Thursday, June 30, 2011

this was originally about edward estlin.

for about three weeks i've been trying to pinpoint the exact day when i decided that i wanted to blog every day in the month of june.

on may fifteenth i wrote what i consider to be one of my favorite blogs, and i think it was around then that i really started to consider it. i had managed to put fun pictures in my blog. i had turned my spectacular weekend into something worth reading.

in other words, i was pretty damn proud of myself.

as i wrote earlier, i had intended to post an e. e. cummings quote as my facebook status every day. i am absolutely in love with e. e. cummings. for my english class (the fairy tale one!) we read his poem anyone lived in a pretty how town. well the first time i read it i didn't understand it, and then i found a brilliant love story that thrives in the midst of controversy.

i wrote a paper on it (compared to my awesome lolita paper, this was rather blah.). and i still intend to memorize the poem. anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down).

i have this e. e. cummings website that i have saved right next to my online spanish homework tab. it's not wiki quotes or anything, it's just this really legit website that has just about everything cool that e. e. cummings ever said or wrote.

"the world laughs in flowers."

"unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense."

"the most wasted of all days is one without laughter."

e. e. cummings is a cool cat who changed the world with a well placed comma. or, well, his lack of commas. he kind of booted grammar out the window.

i frequented this website a lot and wrote down some of my favorite quotes. i wrote them in the notes section of my entirely too busy calendar. i pulled quotes out of stanzas of long, rambling, unorganized poems. i was so utterly ready to post nothing but baller e. e. cummings quotes on facebook and annoy the hell out of my 598 facebook friends.

and then somewhere along the lines i said, "nah, i'd rather just blog."

i think i'm out of my mind. i'm not good at blogging. i obviously don't have enough things to blog about. and if you've seen my calendar, then you know that i absolutely don't have enough time.

well now it's my last day of doing this blog every day in june go! challenge, and i'd say i've done pretty well. for your viewing enjoyment, i'm going to post a beautiful copy of my "this is my blog idea paper" document so you can see exactly what i did and what i never quite got around to. brace yourselves!

This is my awesome list of blogging ideas so I can blog every day in June.

  • the funeral. band of horses.
  • the disuse of the word ‘terrific’.
  • yo hablo espanol. spanish class.
  • my job.
  • my other job.
  • music!
  • getting myself into ridiculous situations.
  • blogging? I feel like I’ve done this before.
  • poetry.
  • e. e. cummings.
  • baking cakes.
  • alma.
  • physical therapy.
  • my apparent lack of skill at blogging.
  • criminal minds.
  • chuck.
  • facebook and/or facebook advertisements.
  • google.
  • the lion king.
  • my fears. perhaps too personal?
  • disney movies.
  • rondo alla turca paininthebutt.
  • trying to drive a stick shift. with focus on the word trying.
  • making this list.
  • trying to blog every day.
  • me actually getting a twitter, oh god.
  • aaaand whatever the hell I feel like.
i'm pretty proud of that list. i blogged about a few things twice, but hey, that's just how it goes. i'm also extremely proud of that fact that i blogged every single blog in times new roman.

i DESPISE times new roman. but for some reason, it looks decently legit on this blogspot website. i can totally handle it.

i honestly feel like i've grown as a person throughout this experience. i've learned that one can blog about whatever they want. i've learned that if you set some time aside in your day to actually do something, it'll become a habit. this was the ultimate goal: that awesome website that told me how to blog said that if you blog every day in enough, it'll become a habit. hopefully i'll blog a lot more from now on. that's the plan, anyway. wish me luck?!

thank you for taking this incredible journey with me. you're as much a part of this as i am! i don't just write these for myself, i write them for you. you and me, and me and you, and now i'm singing "happy together" and belting I CAN'T SEE ME LOVIN' NOBODY BUT YOU FOR ALL MY LIFE. you can sing along, if you like.

so ends my blog every day in june go! challenge. i really hope you enjoyed it as much as i did. :)

post script: for all quotes e. e. cummings, click here. 

(i swear. this is my last shameless plug. i'm on twitter at @emilyyxh!)

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

this is not as terrific as the word penultimate.

okay. so it's ten fifty-five at night.

this is my second to last (penultimate) day in this blog every day in june go! challenge.

it's ten fifty-five at night and i have absolutely no idea what to blog about.

my day has been ridiculously hectic. i got up for work at quarter until seven. i stumbled around the bathroom looking for a swim suit. then i sat around on the starting block trying to figure out what exactly i wanted my kids to swim once i got to work. i also ate kix. it was ballin'.

i had time to do my spanish homework after work like a good working, college girl. but what did i do? i went back to bed for an hour and four minutes. and i had that weird leukemia dream again. i really think i should stop researching it. do these dreams mean something?!

i then ventured to class. i made sure i left exactly on time and i even got there early enough to sit in my car in the parking lot in finish my spanish homework! i did NOT cry listening to the lion king. i was very proud of myself. during spanish class, i read out loud. i wrote about how i wanted to be a spanish teacher. i wondered how young my professor actually is, because she looks younger than me. and she's at least twice as thin. spanish class is spanish class and there's nothing really that exciting about it except that my stomach made some extremely loud hungry noises and i sat in a lefty desk.

i'm right handed. i want to be left handed (even though they die younger than right handed people, true story). my brother and my boyfriend are left handed. and i absolutely adore left handed desks. i'm not sure how i feel about this strange like.

after spanish class, my brother came home. i checked him over for escaped spiders clinging to his shirt, and ran him through the fridge so that he knew to stay away from my bombdiggity spinach lasagna. then i ventured out into the world of physical therapy.

i was decently sore when my physical therapist came to see me, and when i told her this, she said, "oh that's fine, we just won't do any gym exercises!"

i'm thinking about telling her i'm sore everyday.

i fell asleep at physical therapy. dead asleep. i manage to do this just about every single visit and i'm not really sure how it's possible. i feel like i was in a conversation with my physical therapist, and now i'm feeling extremely awkward and nervous. what do you say to someone when you fell asleep on them while they were manipulating the soft tissue of your back? "hi, sorry i fell asleep... did i fall asleep?"

i then talked at my brother in spanish for the enterity of making a fruit salad (la ensalada de frutas!). we ate dinner together. then i went straight to work, had a happy time with a bunch of little kids, and cheered for them as they swam a relay with a gigantic dr. seuss hat on their heads.

i then went to my cousin's house and watched some epic music videos. this is really unlike me. i have this... thing where i can't stand seeing what a musical artist looks like. once i have this picture in my head, i'm worried that it will affect my judgment. i'm worried that i'll accidentally judge their music based on what they look like (weird, i know.). i accidentally looked at the lead singer of mumford & sons. big mistake, brosef. big mistake.

when i got home at ten, i decided that i was going to bake a watermelon cake. no, it wasn't going to taste like watermelon, it was going to look like a watermelon.

while simulatenously skyping with my boyfriend, i mixed together all the ingredients and dumped in as much neon pink food coloring as i could. i then stood around in front of my webcam eating the leftover cake batter with a gigantic spatula (my stomach isn't enjoying that anymore). my fingers are pink. as is my tongue. and my teeth.

i then promptly realized that i didn't have any vanilla frosting. my mother told me over the phone that i could simply use chocolate, but have you heard of a watermelon with a brown rind?

i didn't think so.

my mother instructed (being the queen of all things baking) that when the cake was still warm, i should layer it, cover it with a towel, and put it nice and tight in the cake saver.

while writing this blog, my cake has baked, my boyfriend has laughed at how pink it turned out, and he has listened to my plan to run to the grocery store (in my swim suit) to buy vanilla frosting. before class i fully intend to frost my cake with neon green frosting. lo and behold, i will have a watermelon looking cake!

if i remember, i'm going to post a beautiful picture of it on here as my last blog. get excited. do your watermelon cake dance. and then put it up on youtube for me to watch during my free time. i'd really enjoy it.

this is my penultimate blog. it's been about my day. the real thing is this: i blogged about my day to really show that i had no idea what to blog about my because my day was really busy, i didn't spend any of it at home, and i wasted my prime blogging time baking a watermelon cake while skyping with my boyfriend.

we're still skyping. i'm writing this and he's buried in his thesaurus like a good nerd.

i'm not sure what to think about this blog. i feel like my penultimate blog should definitely be as cool as the word penultimate, but alas, it's not. none of my blogs are that cool. i'm just not that great at blogging, i don't think.

thank you for putting up with me.

only one more blog in this blog every day in june go! challenge. we can survive it.

what will tomorrow be about?

(it's now eleven twenty-three. and i'm going to post this video for your enjoyment because i've been singing it all day.)


i'm really in love with this. don't ask me why. i just am. :)

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

i cried. then i gaped. then i blogged.

okay. so back in the day when i was thinking about doing this blog every day in june go! challenge, i promised myself i wouldn't  blog about the same thing twice. for the record, the initial june go! challenge was to post an e. e. cummings quote as my facebook status every day.

i scratched that for blogging. i'm not really sure how they correspond.

anyway, back in the day, i promised myself i wouldn't blog about something more than once. i've already somewhat broken this rule by blogging about serial killers twice and technically criminal minds twice. if your mind is as circuitous as mine is, i blogged about the same thing. if we get technical, i merely mentioned criminal minds and the focus was really on cannibalism the second time, but i'm really only technical when it comes to grammar and teaching kids how to do freestyle drills.

this blog is going to be breaking the whole 'don't blog about the same thing twice'. but i can't not blog about this. the entire time this was happening i kept thinking, "I WILL BLOG ABOUT THIS... AS SOON AS I GET HOME." i am putting off real person activities (emptying the dishwasher, doing dishes, sweeping) for this blog. the adult part of my mind is dying. the blogging part is excited that i'm finally getting this out. the major themes that are going to repeated are these: the lion king, emotionality (which is merely mentioned occasionally in previous blogs), listening to songs on repeat, and driving. they coincide, i promise.

so it starts like this. do you ever find yourself in one of those situations that's not really all that crazy, but it feels crazy and all you can really do is blink, open your mouth and try to form words, but in the end you just kind of sit there with wide eyes and have your mouth open like a fish? if you don't find yourself in these situations, you haven't lived.

i had one of these moments driving to class today.

yesterday was my first day of class at the new time, so i left pretty early to guage about how long it would take me to get to IPFW and to see exactly how crowded the parking lot would be. i'm a thin, athletic individual, but i'm american. i'm going to park as close to the language building as i can.

today, after guaging the time, i left three minutes later. part of this was because i realized it was probably a good idea to pee before i left. nobody wants to be stuck learning spanish verbs when your bladder is about to explode. it's just... well... uncomfortable.

for having left only three minutes later, i swear, the traffic volume had DOUBLED from yesterday. i didn't really notice until i reached one of the busiest intersections in the city; st. joe and clinton. i was on clinton, trying to turn left onto st. joe. this intersection happens to be right in front of the private catholic high school. they're legit, only wear khaki and blue polo shirts, and say the hail mary instead of the pledge of allegiance.

the left turn lane is not long enough to negotiate the volume of traffic that i was experiencing. i was hanging out into the regular lane with my turn signal on and my window down, and i was listening very intently to "king of pride rock", the last song on my lion king soundtrack. in the movie, it's the epic music where simba takes his epic walk up pride rock, roars his mighty roar that says, HEY I'M KING NOW and then it gets all happy when he has a kid and rafiki is like, HEY. ANOTHER LION I CAN THRUST INTO THE AIR. yeah. that song. on my broadway soundtrack, it's about ten times better than the movie because the vocals are at least twenty times as fantastic.

while i was listening, i was concentrating on traffic. traffic on st. joe was backed up. really backed up. backed up into the middle of the intersection where i would be attempting to turn within three lights. my turn lane was backed up enough that i sat through that light four times. when i got to the fourth time, i was really worried that that taurus, who was just kind of chilling in the middle of the intersection, wouldn't be out of my way. or the three cars in front of me. and i began to worry that i wouldn't make it to class on time. rule number one: do not leave for class three minutes late. the traffic will bite you in the butt.

i turned onto st. joe without incident. the taurus moved. the three cars in front of me moved. i got up to cruising speed, grabbed my volume dial, and cranked it to the right. i do not want to know how loud my car volume can go. when both of my ears were plugged up and i really wanted to jam, i've gotten it up to thirty. i normally drive with it on seven. the only way i would attempt to see exactly how loud it will go is if i had those pink fluffy earmuffs that professor sprout has in harry potter and the chamber of secrets when working with mandrakes. my stereo is awesome. my speakers are better.

while i had king of pride rock going on repeat and i was driving with my windows down, i truly listened to the song. now, none of it is in english until they end when they do a little reprise of the circle of life, but i could hear emotion in every single voice. i didn't even need to picture what was happening in the movie, i just needed to listen to the wonderful music of the lion king.

and without warning, i started bawling my eyes out.

so now i'm driving down st. joe with my windows down on my way to spanish class, listening to zulu entirely too loudly, crying my eyes out over the emotionality of the song. for about a minute i wonder why the hell i'm crying, realize i'm just entirely too emotional of a person, and then try to focus on the individual voices in the song. there's a woman in the chorus of the lion king who can sing way higher than i want to contemplate. i focused on her and how much vocal training she must have gone through. then i wondered if she was one of the american actresses who did lessons in zulu or if she was one of the african actresses we hired in new york for the production. i figured the latter.

as i neared my next turn, wiping my eyes and pressing repeat so i could continue with my emotional music journey, i saw a homeless person standing on the median across the river. i wiped my eyes and got a really good look at him, mostly out of curiosity. in fort wayne it's illegal to be homeless, so most homeless people are good at hiding out. but this guy was just standing on the median in sweaty, nasty clothes with a big grin on his face.

one thought went through my head as i looked at him: isn't that my swim coach?

i gaped. and wiped away more tears. and gaped. and did the whole thing where i sat with my mouth open and blinked like a fish. the situation was not that crazy, but it felt that crazy because i had just finished crying over a mostly instrumental song about a lion and now i had the absurd notion that this homeless man was my old swim coach from high school. this is obviously not true. he's getting married in four weeks and i saw him on saturday at that really fun grad party with the mosquitoes.

when i pulled into the parking lot at IPFW, i realized that i was losing my mind. and that i would have to blog about this. i was terrifically upset that i just couldn't sit down and get it all out now, but i had to walk to the LA building, scale the stairs to the second floor, meet my professor and sit through two and a half hours of learning the imperfect tense and how to make equal and inequal comparisons. but before i did this, i tweeted about the fact that listening to king of pride rock had made me cry like a two year old. i managed to send it before my phone battery died.

whilst driving home, i thought about blogging about this. i began to write this in my head. i kept listening to king of pride rock and lamented that my stereo, as awesome as it is, lacks a repeat button. so every time the song ends with the epic BOOM (and the movie screen says THE LION KING in gigantic red letters), i have to press the down seek arrow to start the song over. at least i wasn't driving and eating mini wheats like yesterday.

sometimes i think that i am emotionally unstable. listening to king of pride rock should not make me cry my eyes out when i have more important things to worry about, like not rea rending the person in front of me. i should not instantly think that every homeless man who looks like my old swim coach actually is my old swim coach. i should be responsible and save my blogging for after i do adult things, like empty the dishwasher, wash my dishes, and eat a slice of pie.

so again i blogged about the lion king. and about driving. and how me being emotional is probably a personality flaw (mostly the crying and the intense excitedness that steal me on occasion). but i guess to sum up this blog, it's about something that i haven't blogged about before, and that's how i turn ordinary circumstances into something that feels completely out of control and i open my mouth like a fish and look stupid trying to handle it.

i suppose i could look more stupid doing other things. like emptying the dishwasher and talking to myself in spanish. which i'm about to go do. day three of being a real person.


okay. so this is the origianl cast broadway album version of king of pride rock. i think you should listen to it. if you cry, that'll make me feel so much better about myself as a person. if you don't, well, you're normal. and listen for that woman i mentioned, she's pretty legit.

Monday, June 27, 2011

"i wrote a book once. it was about macaroni and cheese."

today is the second day into my adventure of being a real person. i only have two more days left of this before my brother comes home to ruin it (probably with a wolf spider clinging to the back of his shirt), so i better milk this for all it's worth.

my second day as a real adult went like this, and i'm honestly going to try not to start tomorrow's blog all like, "my third day as a real adult went like this" because that just gets boring, and nobody cares about my day. i don't even care about my day. well, i do. sort of. anyway. depicting my second but first FULL day as a real person and how utterly irresponsible i was about it: go.

so last night i had this majorly intense dream that i was dying of leukemia. i have never had leukemia. i do not know anyone who's had leukemia, unless it was when they were really little and just don't like to talk about it. but i woke up legitimately afraid that i had leukemia. i feel like i can have this fear and i can have this dream because i've been spending the past four months researching leukemia, specificially the ALL (that's acute lymphoblastic leukemia) kind, and it's easy to go undetected. normally my leukemia research simply makes me terrifically depressed, but when you have a dream that you're dying of it, well, it gets even more depressing and personal.

i'm not sure why i just wrote a pargraph about my leukemia dream. the most important part of what was SUPPOSED to be in that paragraph was this: i set my alarm for the PM instead of the AM. my alarm going off at quarter till seven at night is not going to get me up for work in time. but alas, my leukemia dream saved me! it was very very important in my dream that i had to go get some super special leukemia test at six forty-four in the morning, and lo and behold, i woke up for the test expecting kanye west and i was greeted by silence and the shaky fear that i actually had leukemia.

this ties in with work. maddie, the head coach of the team (i'm the assistant head coach) and i were the only ones coaching this morning because our other assistant coach is in new jersey and our other other assistant coach only works evenings. maddie had been up all night with her other job and was jazzed on energy drinks, and i'd gotten about three hours of sleep, all of which was leukemia intensive. i was up writing my book, which happens to be about leukemia, (well, it's a major theme) and julia, one of the twelve year olds that maddie was working with, was interested in why maddie and i were so completely strung out.

i told her i was up writing a book. when she asked what it was about, i said, "depressing things and dysfunctionality."

she looked me dead in the eye, gave me a gigantic grin and said, "i wrote a book once. it was about macaroni and cheese."

i don't think i've ever laughed so hard in my life. when i got home from work, i tweeted it. it was just that good. i wish you could hear her say it. and see her face. it was terrific.

i told myself i was going to nap for an hour after work, shower, eat lunch, and then head to my second spanish class, the one that's smack in the middle of the afternoon (twelve thirty to three.) instead i ended up calling my physical therapist to reschedule three appointments (it was the most adult thing i've done all day) and then i enjoyed the fact that i have stolen my friend's hulu plus password.

hulu plus is going to suck away my life and make me fail my spanish exam. and keep me from blogging. oh hulu plus. i have access to all seven seasons of grey's anatomy. guess who's going to watch all of it by the end of the summer? that's right. you can guess.

mi clase de espanol was fantastic compared to last term's. the room is smaller, warmer, and the teacher is straight out of espana. lucky for me, my spanish parter from my first class is in this class, and we spent a good ten minutes conversing in spanish and feeling pretty badass about it. i had figured that this class would take absolutely forever because it's in the middle of the afternoon, but it went by extremely quickly. and i had kanye west in my head. that might've helped.

i learned a new exercise in physical therapy. it's not really as exciting as one would think. not exciting enough to blog about.

when i got home at four forty-five, i said, "i'll eat at five thirty, write some more of my book, and then i'll go to my coach's meeting and then to work." out loud. when i'm home alone, i need to hear my own voice.

well this is what actually happened: i watched grey's anatomy until six thirty, fixed a ten minute dinner, and then realized that i had a coach's meeting in eight minutes. i had completely forgotten. while i was running around trying to locate my flip flop and my frog towel (our team mascot is the frog) i began to have a minor asthma attack. and i got a beautiful book idea that would just have to wait.

the adult things i did today were these.

i managed to get myself out of bed on time without setting my alarm.
i watered the plants.
i remembered to bring in the mail and the paper... after dinner.
i actually put my dishes in the dishwasher in a timely manner.
i cleaned my bathroom.
i actually opened my mail that was addressed to me.

the things i am not proud of doing were these.

watching grey's anatomy for a god awful amount of time. at least three hours.
belting out hey soul sister in the shower.
getting completely distracted by that weird taxidermy museum closing when i should've been paying attention to what my kids were swimming.
not sleeping very much.
setting my alarm for the incorrect time.
actually thinking i had leukemia for twenty whole minutes. (seriously. the entire time i was muching on my mini wheats i was having a mini panic attack.)
eating mini wheats while driving.

i've had a decently productive day. but i think that being a real person doesn't mean that you're one hundred percent productive and you don't get distracted by the idea of having every episode of grey's anatomy free for your viewing enjoyment when you have a free moment.

real people procrastinate and get distracted too. if they didn't, they wouldn't be people.

i'm a person. a dysfunctional person. but a person.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

hey, i'm responsible. right?

why is it that whenever you are home alone, everything is ten times scarier?

today is the beginning of what i hope will be a monumental week. until wednesday night, i've got the entire house to myself.

i am ridiculously excited about this. not because i can invite all of my friends over and we can party (with a job and classes i have no time for such shenanigans and don't approve of them anyway), but because i can pretend like i'm a real person.

let me clarify real person.

real person in this context: a working person who lives by themselves or with a spouse, has a house, and is responsible for taking care of some form of dwelling.

this week, i feel like i fit into those categories, and it makes me excited.

working person: i have a job that i will be getting up for six at forty-five. i am a working person.

living: well, right now i'm living by myself. married at twenty is a bit scary to me. and i think scarier to my boyfriend.

house: well, i don't own my house, my dad does. but right now i'm currently responsble for it.

i've been a real person for twelve hours, and so far, i've had fun. i managed to cook my own meals. i've been checking the list that my mother left me on the fridge of things that i must have accomplished during the week almost compulsively. and then i did a true adult thing: i went grocery shopping.

my mother had left me a short grocery list of things to buy, including fruits i don't like for when my brother comes on wednesday to end my solitarity. my list had raspberries and peaches (neither of which i will eat), strawberries (heck yes, favorite food), more milk because i had run out at lunch, and croutons because every salad needs a good crouton.

and thousand island dressing. i didn't buy any. but every good salad needs some kraft free thousand island dressing to cover those kroger brand seasoned croutons.

i went grocery shopping after my parents called me from their layover in las vegas. i have never been to las vegas, but i do know that my parents took ten dollars in nickels to try slot machines. i want a picture of this because if they actually use these nickels to play said slot machines, i need proof. i don't think it will really happen.

my parents called me decently late. so i ended up going grocery shopping around seven thirty in the evening.

god granted me with mysteriously long legs and my mother's walking habits. this means that when i go somewhere, i get there in a timely manner. i got my cart, checked over my strawberries and raspberries, and was already feeling up some peaches before i'd quite realized that i'd moved. i was on a mission. i was also slightly afraid that i'd run into someone at the grocery that i didn't particularly want to see. i'm not sure why i had this fear. but i had it, and i walked very very quickly toward the croutons.

maybe i'm stupid, but i think that a decent place to find croutons would be with breads. croutons are just pieces of really dry, seasoned bread. so when they weren't in the bread aisle, i became slightly confused. the next aisle over was dried foods, and i figured, surely they'll be here, because again, croutons are just pieces of really dry, seasoned bread.

no, they weren't there either.

i found them next to the dressing. which now that i think on it, makes sense. but the aisle wasn't the salad aisle, it was the kool-aid-salad-dressing-other-almost-liquid-stuff aisle. (my father, being a man of science, would call this aisle "the aisle of mismatched slightly viscous or soon to become viscous products.") so do salad dressing and croutons magically go together everywhere? or just my grocery store?

i ran into a traffic jam at the milk. i guess it was really on sale, more so than the other things i was buying. after waiting for what seemed like forever behind some mothers who go grocery shopping so often that it's a sport, i managed to snag two gallons. i was suprised there was some left.

i felt extremely awkward at the check out counter handing them my discount card. i managed to swipe my credit card the right way, but the girl behind the register kept looking at me like, "you're really grocery shopping?" i kept wondering if there was something obscene on my face, the way she was staring at me. i walked out to the parking lot with my precious foodstuffs as quickly as my myteriously long legs would allow without me tipping over the cart and spewing berries everywhere.

after putting away my groceries, i realized that the story of my life had once again played out: i had had terrific fantasies of feeling awesome grocery shopping, but all i had really felt was efficiency and terrible awkwardness.

i'll get there. and my grocery list will appreciate it.

but getting back to the first thing i mentioned about things being scarier at night. after checking my list right before writing this blog, i realized i had forgotten to water my mother's hanging pot on the front porch, and that's underlined about eight million times. which means it's pretty damn important.

the watering can is on the back patio, next to our three season room. i turned on the kitchen light and the patio light, but while i was bending over filling up that watering can, i felt like someone was watching me.

then when i closed up the back porch, locked it up tight, and wandered to the front porch to water the potted plant, i felt like there was someone in my pantry. i turned on the front porch light and angled myself so that i could see the entire street. but when i was watering that silly hanging plant, i felt like that unassuming character at the beginning of a criminal minds episode.

you know, the one who's about to get stabbed.

everything is scarier at night and not adult when you're not really an adult and you're home alone.

if there's one thing i have to learn about my first day as a real person, it's to not save stuff for the evening. be responsible during the day, because at night, that's when there really is a serial killer there when you pull back the shower curtain like a paranoid girl with an afro from a bad eighties movie. and when you're home alone, there's nobody there that's going to hear you scream.

that sounded incredibly melodramatic. we'll just stop blogging here before i become poetic and increasingly paranoid.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

i don't think that question was rhetorical.

okay, so picture this.

i'm sitting in my bedroom with a gigantic bow in my hair that i got in kindergarten. my room is dark because i think that lights waste energy half the time. i'm sitting in my circle pod chair that's covered in pillows and blankets. my feet are crossed, and my god, i'm still listening to kanye west rapping power out of my ihome.

hi, you're looking at me right now.

tomorrow my parents are leaving me to go on vacation (i'm sure there will be a blog about this later this week) and i was hanging out with them when i got back from one of the greatest grad parties ever, minus those terrible little bloodsuckers that really like my perfume. (mosquitoes, not boys, what kind of girl do you think i am?!)

i like to hang out with my parents. i love them. they're cool. they're extremely intelligent. my dad is hilarious. my mom is short. (i'm obviously not.) they're fantastic people.

so we're hanging out in the kitchen and my mom yawns and says something along the lines of, "oh dear, it's getting late, we have a flight to catch in the morning, it's bed time."

my mind says, "oh fuck i haven't blogged yet today. fuck fuck fuck." but i'm nice and keep my swear words in my head like a good little girl. i try not to have a foul mouth. a foul mind is bad enough.

so i say, "oh shoot, i have to blog today! what should i blog about?"

i'm greeted by complete silence. i've expected this. it's pretty much a rhetorical question. my parents, even though they're cool enough to have facebooks, don't truly understand blogging, but heck, i don't either, do i?

so then i tell them that i had a dream earlier in the week that involved a few kids that i coach telling me what i should blog about. my roommate, honest to god, interprets dreams, and i'm pretty sure that she would interpret my dream the way that i did this one: i'm stressed about my job and about this whole blog every day in june go! challenge. my mother then asks me why on earth i'd be stressed about blogging.

and then i said, well, i have READERS!

that's YOU!

even though i don't particularly care, i check my stats. it's nice to know that someone out there is reading whatever you feel like posting on the internet, not just the eighteen people who are crazy enough to follow me on twitter. (shameless ploy, @emilyyxh, check it.) so anyway, i check my stats. and then i realized something.

there are a decent amount of you. yes, you. readers. and you're not all from the united states like me.

no, you're from cool places like denmark. and australia. and canada. i've even had someone read my blog who's from russia.

at this point, i'm really hoping you all can read english, because otherwise viewing my blog is pointless. sure, i've said a few phrases in spanish and had that cool zulu thing going on in my lion king blog, but other than that, i do that english thang.

speaking of english and other languages, i got really excited when i realized that when i become fluent, i can speak spanish at home to my children. as my father says, children adapt, and even if my husband doesn't speak spanish, they'll pick up on it. they can speak spanish with mommy and english with daddy. and when they're old enough, they'll realize which langauge i use when i'm really pissed. it will probably be spanish.

but i digress. i have way more viewers than i thought was possible. and then my father asked me why someone would actually want to read my blog.

that sounds like a mean thing to ask, but it's a curious, harmless question. i don't think my parents have the ability to be mean, so i know that it was a curious question. and then i realized i have no answer.

why do you, reader, read my blogs?

i'm not good at blogging. i'm a twenty year old girl who lives in the midwest who blogs about crazy things like the lion king, serial killers, learning to drive a stick shift, maybe one day hoping to be a spanish teacher, and about the craziness of my life. i'll repeat the first part of this paragraph (can you call it a paragraph if it's not five sentences like they taught you in middle school?) and say, i'm not good at blogging.

maybe i am and i'm not giving myself credit. i tend to do that. i really believe i suck at everything until enough people tell me i'm good at it. and then i only half believe them. this doesn't mean i'm not a confident person, because i am very confident in myself and my abilities. but i honestly believe i'm not just good at blogging.

so thanks for reading, whatever country you're from. the more you read, the more stressed i become about writing something that i feel is decent, and the more likely it is to pop into my dreams. which is fine. because i'm still having those back pain drug induced psychdelic ones and i'm losing my precious z's to them.

to answer the question that i asked my parents earlier, that question my parents thought was perhaps rhetorical, my mother said, "you could blog about how you cooked a lasagna today and it was the first time you've ever really cooked in your life."

keep your eyes out for that blog. i'm sure it'll come before this challenge is over.

Friday, June 24, 2011

i am taller than kanye west.

i have this annoying habit of listening to a song over and over again.

see, i know what you're thinking. you're thinking that it's not really that bad of a problem, listening to a song a few times in a row. but then you look at my top 25 played on itunes and you say, oh.

my most played song, for which my entire blog is named, has over 750 plays. this is just on my ipod. never mind the hours and hours i've had it on repeat in my car.

currently, i am listening to "power" by kanye west. that has been going nonstop in my room since tuesday.

see, this is not even that terrible. my record for longest time listening to a song goes to "such great heights" by the postal service with a ground shattering three weeks of constant listening. that's three weeks. that's five hundred and four hours, which equates to thirty thousand two hundred and forty minutes. this equates to over seven thousand and thirty-two listens to this song. that's not even the times i've listened to it after my three week "such great heights" kick. or all the times randomly in my car.

yes, it's a problem.

while "power" is rolling through my ipod over and over, i haven't had a chance to plug my ipod into itunes to see if it has wormed its way into the allstar top twenty-five most played. i'm pretty darn sure it has by now. number twenty five (miss friday by nico stai) is holding on with a puny one hundred and thirty-five plays. i think kanye west has a nice shot of squeezing his way into listening glory.

i've been trying to figure out exactly why i end up listening to songs over and over for such ridiculous amounts of time. part of it is that delicious OCD cereal i ate that one morning in middle school. about halfway through my intense listening, i simply cannot listen to another song. i have an intense fear that something absolutely terrible will happen if i listen to another song, and i cannot bring myself to listen to anything else. it's an almost paralyzing fear, and the more i tell myself that it is an absolutely pointless fear, the more overwhelming it becomes.

this fear never lasts very long. a day at most. i enjoy ignoring it. we all enjoy ignoring things like that.

i need a song to fill me up completely. i don't think this will ever truly happen with a song, but i will listen to it until i feel like it's filled me up enough. i'm still figuring out exactly what this means, what it constitutes. it's a feeling. a beautiful, glorious feeling.

i don't know how to achieve this feeling. before i can fully get to this point in my musical experience, sheer song exhaustion takes over. my favorite song, "swim until you can't see land" by frightened rabbit, hasn't gotten to that point yet, even after thousands of listens. i can listen to it without hearing it.

but every once in a while, when that song plays, i get chills down my spine just like i did the very first time that i heard it.

"such great heights" has been worn out. it's been exhausted. i honestly don't think i can stand to listen to it anymore. maybe someday i'll able to go back to it.

i worry that this will happen with "swim until you can't see land." i don't want this to happen to it. i'm terrified that this will happen to it. i will find myself worn out, run down, and when that comes pops up when my ipod is on shuffle during a dorm cleaning frenzy, i'll sigh, roll my eyes, and skip it.

i want to feel that shiver of excitement every time it comes on like i do now. like i have for the past seven months. that shiver that makes me stop my cleaning frenzy, drop my duster, close my eyes, and breathe.

i think that feeling is me being full to the brim with music.

i doubt i'll get this with "power." i work out to "power." and sure as hell can clean my room to "power." my room has never been this clean in my life. thank you, kanye. he didn't interrupt my life like he interrupted taylor swift. i really thought she was going to cry.

i think if he interrupted me, i'd hit him. hard. i'm taller than he is.

i'm really hoping i'll get this filled to the brim feeling more often.

but as kanye west says in power, "until then, fuck that, the world's ours."


for those of you who are interested, this is "swim until you can't see land." enjoy my favorite song. :)

Thursday, June 23, 2011

well there went my childhood.

warning: this will ruin fairy tales for you. you can turn back now. i wouldn't blame you in the slightest.

as an education major with my main focus being literature, i'm required to take introduction to literary analysis. this class changes every year. it keeps the same course number, but every year, it's a different type of literature.

the one that i landed myself into was "revising fairy tales."

i had this super happy idea that we'd be writing fairy tales and reading them. that sounded absolutely exciting to me. but you know enough about my life by now that when i get a super terrific happy thought in my brain, what actually happens is never super terrific and happy.

my professor, dr. v (von wallmenich, say that five times fast) was just about the coolest professor i'd ever encountered. the first day, she said, "if you ever get lost while we're reading, you just raise your hand and shout "DR. V, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THIS TEXT?"" i thought i wouldn't do that.

oh, but i did. it felt pretty damn awesome, too.

she also said that to get through english, you need to be able to bullshit. "pull wisdom out of your ass and you will be golden. it's an art that you're going to college to perfect."

the first book we plowed through was transformations by anne sexton. it was her take on grimm's traditional fairy tales in poem form. now, if you don't know anything about anne sexton, you should know this: she's more perverted than that fifteen year old who never leaves you alone. she was sexually abused by her father. she was bipolar and writing poetry kept her stable. when poetry stopped being stabilizing, she took her own life.

grimm's fairy tales just got grimmer.

i absolutely loved her poetry and her style. but in anne sexton's world, sleeping beauty was sexually assaulted by her father while she was asleep. and rapunzel... well, mother gothel sexually abused her too. cinderella's happy ending was too much of a happy ending and she was forever trapped by it, collecting dust like a figurine.

her poems were graphic through her fantastic use of metaphor. i appreciate her poetry for everything that it is; raw metaphor. i enjoyed reading her take on the grimm fairy tales. i loved how each fairy tale had a subtle message of her childhood. each poem opened with a narration in first person in which she described herself as a witch. she was not the princess. and she didn't need to be. she just needed to write.

from there we moved to the wolf trilogy by angela carter. these were creepy. they were very dark. the symbolism was driven by metaphoric rape and menstration. that's all red riding hood is. she's an innocent menstrating girl who gets devoured by male desire. we read at least five different versions of little red riding hood, and in every single one, she was an innocent but independent woman (angela carter's wise child concept) who was eventually consumed and raped by a male's desire. no happy endings for her. i won't even get into wolf alice. you can read that yourself and make of it what you want.

then we got into lolita.

you can judge me all you want, but i love lolita. i am in love with a story about a man in love with his stepdaughter. lolita is one of the most intriguing and most eloquent pieces of literature ever written. i could spend my life being happy as a lolita scholar and study nothing but lolita the rest of my life. but as we got into it, i kept thinking: how the hell is this a fairy tale?

dr. v kept calling lolita "humbert's wayward fairy tale" and it took me a while to understand exactly what she meant. humbert's account of of his life lusting after his stepdaughter is exactly what dr. v said it was; a fairy tale. humbert is in his own little world of insane infatuation and he will do whatever it takes to be with lolita. his entire life has become nothing but a pedophilic fantasy that he puts onto paper. there are also hundreds of allusions to fairy tales throughout the novel. as humbert plunges through his fairy tale of a life, he references them so often you can't keep count of them. humbert's fairy tale does not have a good ending either, but you learn that in the beginning of the book. you work your way to how he got to where he got to through his lust for a little girl named dolores haze.

as if i wasn't terrified enough with werewolves and sexually assaulted disney princesses, we watched pan's labyrinth. it won a fair number of academy awards if i remember this correctly, and the movie is an absolute masterpiece. it's a foreign film, so we watched it in its original language (spanish) with english subtitles. we looked for the contrast between the real world of the film and the fairy tale world of the film. and then we came across the child eater.

the child eater is arguably the scariest movie monster ever created.

i will not post a picture of it on here. after i saw that movie, i could not sleep for five hours. i had to sleep with the light on. i would not sleep without my roommate in my room. i cried myself to sleep i was so afraid. there was a little voice in my head that said, "you are a grown ass man" (woman?) but that didn't help whatsoever. the child eater scared the living daylights out of me.

pan's labyrinth does not have a happy ending.

not a single fairy tale we went through had a happy ending. even the things that we read that didn't seem to be fairy tales didn't have happy endings.

growing up in the disney renaissance, i believed that things turned out okay. but disney spent a lot of time changing plots and creating happy endings. they pulled a lot of strings.

after taking this class, i feel like a lot of my childhood was ruined. i'm really hoping i didn't ruin yours by writing this.

if you can take away anything from this blog, let it be this:

1. read lolita. it's one of the greatest books ever written.
2. fairy tales suck. but they all have intense moral lessons.
3. watch pan's labyrinth with a buddy. (for more than just the reason of the child eater.)
4. take a class on fairy tales and expand your world.

have a happy ending. :)

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

blogging for killers.. again. kind of.

i've blogged about serial killers before.

if i'm correct, that's my second blog. i'm really too lazy to check. this is my twenty-second blog this month, so that's a lot of clicking on that giant orange button that says "older posts."

serial killers are decently taboo.

a lot of things are taboo. they vary from culture to culture. a lot of things that we do here in the united states would be absolutely scandalous in say... zimbabwe.

there are (generally) two taboos that are universal. drum roll please:

1. incest.
2. cannibalism.

a lot of cultures have different definitions of incest. generally, brothers and sisters are out in terms of marriage, but not necessarily cousins. i learned in my anthropology class that it's usually socially acceptable to marry your cross cousin.

i don't have a cross cousin. on either side of my family.

but this blog is kind of sort of maybe not really about serial killers, so the main taboo that's on my brain right now is cannibalism. yes, it's nine fifteen at night, i just got off work, and i'm thinking about cannibalism. i've been thinking about it all afternoon. my mind is a circus with too many trapeze artists and a lion that's not trained well enough.

if you know me well (or you've read my blog about serial killers) you know that they're a hobby of mine. i wrote that awesome sixteen page paper on them equipped with a presentation that involved me carrying around a human skull (relax, it was plastic.). it really freaked out my orchestra teacher, and it came in handy later when i had to act out a part of hamlet (alas, poor yorick, i knew him!). but i digress. fact of life: i like serial killers.

another fact of life: i watch criminal minds like there's no tomorrow. i watch it more for the killers and what they do and how they behave more than for the action and the character interaction (all of which is fantastic, by the way). today, after physical therapy, i decided that i wanted to watch criminal minds, but i didn't really feel like frequenting the two seasons that i own; i wanted to watch season three.

like a good college girl, i opened my google chrome and proceeded to my favorite website that lets me watch criminal minds episodes for free, no doubt illegally. i clicked on an episode in season three i'd only seen bits and pieces of on television while studying for an organic chemistry exam. the part that i saw looked decently intriguing. and the killer looked like jeffrey dahmer, which gave him extra terrific points from me, the avid viewer and killer enthusiast.

halfway through the episode, the reliable BAU team had decided that their killer was a cannibal. the conversation between the team went something like this:

"how did we get to cannibalism?"
"well, they'd all been frozen and he wasn't abusing them sexually. and he took their legs."
"cannibalism. the greatest taboo. don't we have a lovely job?"
"it's like a sexual urge. a crosswiring of the most basic human drives. sustinence and sex."

so, they got to cannibalism.

i had this on my brain the entire episode, even after they caught the cannibal, flew back to virginia, and i moved on with my life. i moved my life onto dinner.

i'm a vegetarian. so i didn't have any terrifying images of my hamburger suddenly becoming human flesh because, well, my veggie burger looks like... a veggie burger. i got through dinner just fine without feeling disgustingly sick to my stomach. until dessert.

my mother baked short bread and put strawberries on top with whipped cream. strawberries are my favorite food, so i was super stoked. while we were eating, the conversation turned to old reality shows, and we reminisced about fear factor. i loved that show except when they had to lie in tanks of tarantulas. this lead to how the second challenge usually led to something disgusting, like fishing through sewage or drinking something terrible. this then led to talking about how survivor challenges used to have a "here drink this nasty stuff for immunity" challenge while fear factor was still on air. and then my mother said, "hey, wasn't there a year where they had to drink a milkshake made out of cow's blood and milk?"

suddenly my strawberry juice looked a hell of a lot like blood.

no, i did not finish my shortcake. and no, i did not vomit.

cannibalism and incest. the two universal taboos.

because my mother is a biology teacher, i have enough genetic knowledge to actually write a fairly detailed blog about the dangers of incest. what i have on cannibalism is this: in the movie the book of eli, eating people makes you shake. if you run into a shaky person, you run the hell away. i don't think this is factual. i just know that denzel washington makes a really badass blind guy trekking across a nuked america with a braille bible.

go, denzel, go.


(i don't know how to end this blog. it's awkward and taboo and not the best. so i'll just end it by cheering on denzel washington as he kicks butt on his way to alcatraz where that guy from heroes has a library.)

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

i conjugate, you conjugate, we conjugate.

i'm going to college to become a teacher.

this is very natural to me. my mother is a teacher. so is my father. so are my aunt, uncle, grandma, other aunt, and about... fifteen of my grandmother's eight million cousins. and a few of my great aunts. i have a lot of those running around ohio.

my number one goal is to be an english teacher. that's high school english, not seventh grade english where all you do is write out spelling words and do grammar worksheets. i want to be that awesome teacher who makes hamlet fun and can actually manage to get you to read charles dickens without committing suicide. i believe we call this class literature, not english. that is my ultimate goal.

my second goal (penultimate, perhaps?) is to teach spanish. by the time i graduate, i hope to be fluent (and hopefully have studied abroad in argentina) and be that nice spanish teacher who lets you pick a spanish name and brings chips and salsa to class every friday. i will help you say "me llamo bob, como estas?" i want to do that. i really do.

while i was sitting in my first college spanish class the other day, i realized that there's a distinct possibility that i will teach english.

in spanish.

i thought about this long and hard instead of writing down all the conjugations for irregular spanish verbs in the preterite. (i am seriously regretting this, my final is tomorrow.) the kids i would be teaching would be fluent in spanish and i would be teaching them how to say, "hello, my name is bob, how are you?" instead of "me llama bob, como estas?" i'd have to think in spanish. speak in spanish. and try to teach my native language. and when i speak in english, i'd get all those looks that we give my current spanish teacher when she rambles in spanish. those looks of, "what the hell, slow down, the only word i got out of that was 'libro'. which i forgot under my bed."

for about a day, i thought that this would be absolutely terrific.

then i realized that english is the hardest language to learn, besides russian and arabic. i don't think english has a single regular verb. and remember that blog where i wrote about the word terrific? yeah, we have probably five times as many verbs as every other language.

in spanish, we conjugate all the time. yo hablo, tu hablas, el/ella/usted habla, nosotros hablamos, ellos/ellas/ustedes hablan.

i talk, you talk, he/she talks, we talk, they talk.

english conjugates in the weirdest ways.

we don't have set endings like spanish does. sure, we add an s in the third person singular for the present, and in the past we drop the e and add ed. remember that craziness from third grade and you kept asking, why do we drop the e when we just add it again with the d? i sure remember asking that. and then there's the whole mess of not having an e at the end, then it's just add ed, right? sure, until you get to stupid verbs like can. and will. but that gets into future tense. we won't go there.

in english, just about every single one of our verbs is irregular. can you imagine trying to memorize that? and CONTRACTIONS. oh lord, contractions. i spent an entire day trying to speak without using a single contraction, and it was ridiculously hard. i also felt terrifically snobby.

english is hard. and stupid.

we don't think about it, but we conjugate all the time. all those irregular verbs, we conjugate them all the time without evening thinking about it.

i conjugate. you conjugate. he conjugates. she conjugates. we conjugate. they conjugate. the WORLD conjugates.

so much conjugation, so little time.

there's also the problem of infinitives (los infinitivos!). in spanish, they're all one word and super nice. conjugate it, and you've got a verb in whatever tense you conjugated it in! yippee! we can make verbs!

in english, we can turn anything, including nouns, into infinitives.

all ya gotta do is stuck 'to' in front of it and BAM, infinitive time.

to swim. to run. to blog. to grammar. to college.

in college (at least at mine), if you don't know your greek letters for your frats and sororities, you are told this: "learn to college." and if you suck at grammar, well, you better "learn to grammar." i'm okay with the greek stuff. i can sing you the greek alphabet. and i actually know the difference between your and you're, unlike all of my facebook friends.

look at us cool college kids, inventing infinitives and not knowing how to use contractions and possessives.

english is verbose and strange enough that we can invent just about whatever we want. like that time back in 1888 where we suddenly decided to make terrific mean fantabulous and not frightening.

i'm waiting for the day when i get to say, "caída de la e y añadir ed" to my new students who want to learn english.

drop the e and add ed.


(forgive my lack of spanish accents, i'm terrible with alt keys. another personality flaw.)

Monday, June 20, 2011

just push that button right there.

i am proud to say that i, emily hollenberg, have entered the world of modern technology.

you already know that i've never had cable except in my dorm room, and even then i don't watch anything but network TV.

the teeny TV in my bedroom here at my house has a VCR. i've got the lion king looped. for my birthday i actually got a DVD player, so i've had the luxury of watching DVDs on my little television. i was so excited i almost had an asthma attack. i could watch criminal minds and chuck on my TV. it was so incredibly legit.

i get unnecessarily excited. it's a personality flaw. and it's highly annoying. i apologize to any of my readers who have to deal with it.

but my DVD player wasn't my move into the world of modern technology. i thought that my laptop that i got for graduation was because it had windows seven and we actually have wireless in my house.

no, today, i got a touchscreen cell phone.

yes. i told you that i'd blog about this in my last blog. go ahead and judge. i'm just true to my word.

i'm going to start off blogging about cell phones like this.

i absolutely HATE kids who have cells phones. you do not need a cell phone until you can drive. you have no reason to have a cell phone. i think once you hit age fifteen, then it's fine. but if you're twelve, there's no need for you to be buying apps at the app store. play outside like i did when i was a kid. get in touch with nature. and especially if you're under the age of fifteen, you sure as hell do not need an iphone or an adroid. what on EARTH could you possibly do with a phone that nice and expensive if you're just finishing up elementary school?

i'm touchy about this. this is because i didn't get a cell phone until i was seventeen.

yeah that's right. seventeen.

and i didn't get a nice slide phone with a keyboard like my friends got. no, i got a teeny little flip phone from walmart. honest to god, my dad bought it at walmart for twenty dollars. the payment plan on it is beautiful, however. it's a prepaid tracfone, and my dad bought me a set number of minutes i can use. calling is one minute, receiving a call is one minute, and then the number of minutes the call actually is. sending a text is a third of a minute, receiving is a third. i thought maybe, now that i had a cell phone, i could text and be like all the cool kids who had cool phones. i could make my lame phone cool.

no, that wasn't the plan. my cell phone was for emergencies. i got 300 minutes. for an entire year.

if you had my phone, you'd spend that in about... a week. just texting.

i didn't upgrade every year. as soon as a new phone comes out, i know people who go get them. i got to stuck with my little walmart phone (i named him simon, obviously after simon from lord of the flies) for three entire years. so when people complained about having an old phone and how they needed a new one, i felt no sympathy. when people whined about how they didn't have a touchscreen and their keyboard was so ungodly lame, i felt no sympathy. maybe i'm mean. but i just didn't care.

i liked simon. i really did. he was extremely resilient. if you want a phone for LIFE, get a tracfone, because they will not break. honestly. i threw simon out of a two story window and he doesn't have a scratch, bump, bruise, or dent. he is still one hundred percent functional.

functionally, i had no need to upgrade my phone. now that i have two jobs, my dad buys me more minutes because i expect phone calls that aren't just emergencies, and as i said, simon was fully functional. but i was really feeling the pain when suddenly all of my friends had iphones and adroids. or at least touchscreen phones that had internet connections.

when tracfone came out with a touchscreen phone that could connect to the internet for fifty bucks, i pounced on that like a lion takes down a wounded gazelle. so in other words... terrifically.

i bought the phone with my own money. i spent an entire week awaiting it. when it came, it was very anticlimactic. in my head, i had this terrific vision of the doorbell ringing, me screaming OMG MY PHONE IS HEREEE and epically leaping down the stairs and throwing up the front door to sign the package over from the nice fedex man. and then i would run upstairs, rip open the box, and activate my new touchscreen phone and send my very first mobile tweet.

what actually happened was this: i was taking a well deserved nap and didn't hear the doorbell ring. my mother signed over the package, took it upstairs, and dropped it on my head.

i woke up enough to say, is that my phone? then shoved the package off of my bed and slept for another hour and a half.

after dinner i activated it, transferred my old number, all my contacts, figured out which little apps i wanted to have displayed on my screen, and took a few pictures for my wallpaper. then i sent my first tweet, was rather alarmed and how many airtime minutes it cost me just to connect to the internet, and then i went to work like a good working college girl.

i have joined the world of technology. i have tweeted from a mobile device. i have mastered the art of touchscreen scrolling. i can pull out my phone and be proud of it.

but does this mean that i'm going to use my phone for every little thing and constantly be bending over it like everybody else on the planet? absolutely not.

i am very proud about the fact that i am extremely cell phone independent.

I AM AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN. and i love my new phone.

rest in peace, simon. you were a good phone. but all good things come to an end.

post script: i will probably alert you when i have named my new phone. naming things is another personality flaw. i have a lot of those.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

down to zero, here we come!

for a long time, i've liked the idea of countdowns. counting down to something exciting, counting down to something that you're absolutely dreading, counting down to something.

i like the idea.

i've never really had countdowns, however. it's kind of like the thing where i have a need to be organized? i just never actually get around to having countdowns. sure, i SAY that i'm counting down to something, but if you actually ask me how many days, hours, minutes, what have you, i have no idea.

this summer, the busiest and most terrific summer of my life, i actually have countdowns, and i'm rather proud of myself for having them. i'm also a little bit ashamed because sometimes i feel that having a countdown is for lesser people who waste away their lives.

honest to god, during my last month of high school, i did not keep a day countdown. my teachers did, sure, and marked how many days until they could get out of school, just like us. i really only knew how many days of high school i had left until the very last week of school. i was more excited about my birthday. i believe that one of my largest personality flaws is my overexcitement for my birthday. it's obnoxious and i really really try to keep it under control.

the countdowns of emily hollenberg are as follows. brace yourself.

THE STATS.

six days until leigh-ann palmer.
one day until i get my new and first touchscreen phone.
a week and half until my brother comes home to visit.
three days until spanish finals.
one week until my new spanish class (go second semester!).
exactly two months until i move back to alma.
two months and two weeks until i start alma classes.
twenty-six days until harry potter comes out. i will cry. and cry. and cry. and cry.
twenty-six days until city swim.
twenty-nine days until my job ends.
forty-seven days until summer classes end.
fifty-two days until CEDAR POINT!
one week until my parents abandon me for a week. i hope i don't starve because i do NOT know how to cook.
approximately three years until i graduate from college, move out, and officially begin my life.

i'm really trying not to focus on the last thing on this list. if i focus too much about things like... where am i going to live? where can i apply for jobs? how can i pay off my student loans? what kind of car can i afford? what size apartment can i afford? will i actually be able to move out?

if i focus on things like that, then i'm going to completely waste my last three years of college. college is about having fun, finding yourself, and becoming independent. the whole "having fun part" kind of gets lost to the winds if i spend too much time worrying about how i'm going to financially support myself.

but nonetheless, three years until the future.

the most pertinent (now that's a nice word) countdowns are really just about this month and this summer. tomorrow i get my new phone. it's about time, because i've only had one phone my whole life. i didn't even get it until i was seventeen, and it's a silly little walmart flip phone that i had for three years. i will probably have a nice blog about this later this week when i actually have my hands on my new little joy. that's been a countdown since last week when i ordered it online.

if it's not all it's advertised to be, like most of life, i'm going to cry. because i don't get a refund.

i feel like countdowns give you focus. you have a deadline. you know what you have to get done by this time, and you can plan accordingly, including intense procastination. i enjoy intense procrastination until the moment comes where i actually have to get my act together and do something. then i'm a classic procrastinator and grump about it. deadlines are nice to have. they let you know where you stand.

i also feel like countdowns can distract you. if you focus too much on how much time needs to elapse before a big event, you lose the process of getting to the event. life is about the journey, not about the destination. everybody dies, and nobody really knows where we go, so enjoy the journey of getting there.

the entire time i've been writing this, i've had the song "graceland" in my head by the new pornographers.

the first line of the song: count down to zero, to zero, are you listening?

Saturday, June 18, 2011

thanks, pete.

today marks an annual occurrence that i started doing when i was probably six. the actual event that i've been attending has actually been going on since 1994. so i guess i've been doing it almost the entire time it's been an event.

today was pete johnston.

that means absolutely nothing to you.

pete johnston is a summer swimming invitational held every june at park forest pool. it has mixed gender relays and an oddity called a crescendo relay that i absolutely loved when i was little. pete johnston was always a ridiculous amount of fun because i saw all of my friends on all the other summer teams. when i was little, i was actually a good swimmer, (something happened when i started to swim in college) and i had hopes of winning medals. it was all day. and the pool is right behind my best friend jacob's house and every once in a while, he'd come outside to watch me swim.

my parents hated pete johnston. as a young, naive swimmer who couldn't put on her own swim cap, i never understood why.

now that i am twenty years old and have been coaching a summer team for three years, i can understand with perfect clarity why my parents hate the memorial invitational that is pete johnston.

this morning, after i'd been dreading the meet all week, i pulled into park forest's parking lot at five forty-five in the morning. i was the first person at the meet, so i contented to sit in my car, sip my starbucks, and chastise myself for having only gotten four hours of sleep.

every year i know that pete johnston is long. and hot. and early. but i nonetheless get less than five hours of sleep. consistently.

once people began to arrive, then it was putting up the tent. then it was getting a heat sheet. then it was bending over the heat sheet and highlighting every single autumn ridge swimmer. and then it was actually dealing with the kids. kids that were as excited as i used to be when i was their age.

by seven, it was still chilly. i was still running on the caffeine of my starbucks. i hadn't felt my mosquito bites yet. i had energy to jump and yell and cheer and scream and be SUPER COACH EMILY.

by ten thirty in the morning, two and a half hours into the meet, it was ninety degrees. i was starving. my left arm was considerably tanner than my right arm. my voice was hoarse from screaming for my kids to swim faster. my hand was sore from giving high fives. i had accidentally written on myself with heat-scratching pen at least five times. i was dehydrated and i didn't have enough time between my kids' swims to actually go apply sunscreen. i had to pee. my feet hurt because i'd been standing for four hours.

i can see why my parents absolutely hated pete johnston.

but despite that pete johnston starts at six in the morning and usually runs until three in the afternoon and it's just constant standing and screaming in the intense glare of the june sun, it's fun. doing it from a coaching perspective is so much different that from a swimmer's perspective.

i truly love every single kid that i coach. i coach 141 of them, and i do not know all of their names, but i love them all. i love them for deciding to be swimmers, for coming to practice, for smiling at me, for doing what i ask of them. i love them for having team spirit and i love them for making me laugh. i even love them for my making my job an absolute living hell.

so it's hard to hate a gigantic meet like pete johnston where i see other coaches just like me loving their swimmers the way that i love mine. it's worth the sunburns, uneven tanlines, mosquito bites, the hunger, the foot pain, and the absolute no sleep followed by extreme exhaustion. everything is worth it.

no matter how much i bitch about pete johnston beforehand, during the actual spectacle, and after i get home and i'm drenched in sweat and my hair is curling in eight different directions, i love it.

i love it because i love my job, and i love my kids.

you know, at the beginning of this blog, i was possibly going for something funny and entertaining, but all i really got was sentimentality. i really gotta work on this blogging thing.

(this blog is dedicated to pete johnston, swimmer and friend, may 10th, 1974 to june 17th, 1993. thanks for making the world of swimming a better place.)

Friday, June 17, 2011

paging the doctor, you have a patient.

hello, my name is emily, and i'm addicted to being too busy.

addicted isn't the right word.

it's more like... i'm just constantly busy. i could call it superwoman syndrome if i wanted, because i tell myself that i can do everything. like be a resident assistant, be on the swim team, take ALL of my classes on mondays, wednesdays and fridays, manage to watch chuck and criminal minds, have forty hours of placement in alma's public high school, get all of my school work done, spend my mandatory six hours in the library a week, and still manage to sleep.

i can do that. i think.

so superwoman syndrome has gotten me into the busiest summer of my life. i struggled and struggled until my father brought home a GIGANTIC planner from our credit union and said, "happy belated birthday."

there is something written down for every single day in june. most days have four or five things.

for today, june seventeenth, i have written down "jacob comes at 7:30!!! coach's meeting 10 am. ONE appointment 1:30 pm."

that last thing is what this blog is really about. possibly. maybe. it's going to try to be. i think i can manage to stay on topic.

at my first ONE appointment for my back, they gave me a back brace, three prescription pills, and a number to call for physical therapy. before i left, i managed to get the guy molding the plaster of my brace to sign his kids up for my swim team. i felt productive.

i was assigned to see dr. jenkinson. the guy i talked to for almost half an hour about my agonizing back pain was a man named kevin something or other, and the entire appointment, i thought he was dr. jenkinson. i realized i was wrong later while i was waiting for my back brace to be ready when the actual dr. jenkinson came in, tried to shake my hand, and told me that i didn't have to sleep in my brace. then he left.

today, at one thirty, was my follow up appointment. i had high hopes for this appointment. i always have really high hopes for doctor's appointments. not so much with the dentist, but i expect a decent amount out of a serious appointment like this one.

in the waiting room, i tried not to stare at the kid who had a cast from his wrist to his shoulder. i didn't want to contemplate exactly what he'd broken and how much it had hurt, and exactly how long he was going to be in physical therapy to have it work right again, if it ever did. i focused on the television and how terrible we are with closed captioning. CNN's story of the day: conspiracy theories about whether president obama is building a golf course behind the white house.

i kid you not.

i waited a painstakingly long time alone in patient room one. even with a back brace, if i'm sitting in a chair that doesn't have a back, my back is not strong enough to support itself for long. i couldn't lean against the wall because there was a gigantic framed poster of knee injuries. and because my back is beautiful and always in pain, i didn't even have the luxury of twisting around to look at it and be fascinated by the mechanics of the knee and what i could do to it to render me incapable of walking for a long time.

i was visited by kevin something or other again. he told me that i could get an MRI and some gigantic needle put in my back, or we could wait for another six weeks to see what happened. with my fear of needles, you can guess which option i chose. besides, MRI's are expensive, noisy, and claustrophobic. the one i had on my feet when i was seventeen was bad enough.

kevin something or other told me that i did not need a special x-ray like my physical therapist had suggested to me the other day. i suspect she won't be happy when i alert her of this at my next appointment. tonight, it's very possible i'm going to lie in bed and have an terrific vision of her and kevin something or other yelling over the phone about whether or not i have spondylolisthesis (say that five times fast). i feel like my physical therapist is going to win. she's pretty hardcore.

after kevin something or other left after telling me that he'd see me again in six weeks to see where my back was, i was escorted to check out by a nice lady who had a chart with my name on it. the lady behind the check out counter was even nicer, gave me a gigantic calendar to look at so i could figure out when my appointment would be, and how i could work it into my entirely too busy summer. we picked a date. it's written down in my gigantic planner.

halfway home, while i was sitting at a red light, i realized i didn't see dr. jenkinson at all.

i reported this to my father, who frowned and voiced exactly what i had been thinking the rest of the drive home: what exactly do orthopaedic doctor's do if they don't see patients?

i really think i'm one of those people who expects too much out of an appointment. i was extremely disappointed that i'm stuck in the back brace for another six weeks (it ruins cute sundresses and is extremely hot during my outside job), but i figured that i wasn't out of the woods with it yet. i was disappointed that i had to keep taking my scary drugs that induce my rather psychedelic dreams, and i was terrifically disappointed that i had not seen my actual orthopaedic doctor.

i'm not sure what he looks like. if i remember correctly, it's possible that he's bald.

dr. jenkinson, if you're out there, you have a patient named emily hollenberg with back pain and a back brace who'd like to meet you.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

it's not fun without an explosion.

i like to bake.

don't get confused by thinking that i'm good at baking. because i'm not. in fact, i'm terrible. and i'm afraid of ovens. straight up.

it's always sad when you love to do things that you're terrible at. but it's also kind of terrific because you work at it and work at it and eventually, you'll get good.

i'm hoping that's what happens to me with baking at any rate. so far i haven't improved much.

today's task: blueberry muffins.

my mother, like most mothers, is an excellent baker. my mother is just about good at everything she does. she bakes, cooks, and sews. i had the BEST halloween costumes when i was little. and she used to sew us matching dresses for easter sunday. we were that cool. but anyway. my mother  has recipes piled up on recipes which are piled up on more recipes, and she's the only one who can figure out her filing system. today, she pulled out a small, aged, water spotted notecard with my great grandmother's handwriting on it and said, "follow the recipe, we'll be home before you leave for your swim meet."

and she left me alone in the kitchen.

this is perfect for me, because when i bake, i need to bake alone. i can't have other people in the kitchen. in fact, i can't have other people on the same floor. the entire first floor of my house is open and has about... two doors. so i absolutely cannot permit anyone to be within sight of me. thus, i shun them to the basement.


my "going away to college" cake. it looks edible, right?
 under normal circumstances, i bake cookies and cakes. i really enjoy baking cakes and cupcakes, and i can actually bake a decent looking cake. i've been working on frosting for a long time now, and i really think i've reached the point where my cakes look edible. but i'd never made muffins before. there was no muffin mix. this was all me. and that gigantic bag of frozen blueberries i had thawing in the sink.

i encountered my first problem trying to read the tiny notecard. perhaps this just runs on my mother's side of the family, but our handwriting is tiny. MY handwriting is absolutely gigantic, but my mother writes in miniscule cursive. so does her mother. and so did her mother, the writer of this recipe.

i squinted. i picked up the card. i turned it this way and that. i squinted some more. a water stain had almost completely obliterated the second line of directions, and there was one stubborn ingredient i simply couldn't read. i figured it out by process of elemintation; there was no mention of butter anywhere else in the recipe. butter it was.

so i began to add ingredients to my mixing bowl (thinking that i'd blog about this) and i began to mix up the sugar and butter. this made the sugar explode everywhere, i had to do some intense stabbing with my spatula, and then go back to squinting at the ingredients. i couldn't figure out how to get the teaspoon spoon off of the ring with the other measuring spoons, so i ended up using it with the other spoons dangling uselessly and getting needlessly dirty.

when i added the last ingredient, milk, and turned on the mixer, there was a rather colossal explosion of milk and dough.

by the time i'd finished wiping that up from off of... well, everywhere, i had another problem on my hands. the recipe said to fold in the blueberries.

at one point in my life, when i was fourteen, i knew a lot about cooking terminology. i had ended up getting shunted into home ec class with ms. knipp, and god did i hate listening to her voice. she sounded like a chicken with a headcold. but she knew what she was talking about. she taught me to sew on a button (don't ask me how, i have no idea anymore) and how to sew, all the parts of a sewing machine (our test was to label a diagram) and how to navigate my way around the kitchen. i actually made hard candy in her class, and i must say, it was rather delicious. so at one point in her class, i knew what folding was.

but while i was standing there with my gigantic mixing bowl of a double recipe of blueberry muffin dough, i did not know how to fold.

luckily for me, my mother chose this moment to come home from her shopping spree at half price books and she told me to just dump the blueberries in and stir it carefully with my spatula.

so i did. and i fretted when a few blueberries exploded and some of their color leaked into the dough. my mother's muffins are always perfectly white with blueberries in the middle. my blueberry muffins are probably going to turn out purple. at least they haven't exploded in the oven yet while i write this.

my mother's baking weapon of choice is our melon baller. it's used for just about anything that needs to be in a dollop. so this means muffins, small cookies, and cupcakes: prepare to get balled. i find the melon baller to be quite nice; just dip, turn over into the muffin tin, and squeeze. everything comes out nice and clean and you're not shaking a spoon uselessly over a pan, trying to get the dough to come off and land where you want it. my new baking weapon of choice (after the ever present and always authentic spatula) is the muffin baller. like mother, like daughter.

while i was balling the dough into my muffin tins, my mother went over to the mixer and asked me what had happened. this was after i had cleaned up all of my explosions.

one day, i will be good at baking. hopefully this time comes before i live on my own. that time is coming faster and faster.

but no matter how terrible i am at baking, i still absolutely LOVE it.