Saturday, July 30, 2011

this is how my life works.

okay. there is no possible way that i could not blog about this. so here i am, blogging about it. i'm trying to wrap my head around how ridiculous my life is, amd possibly writing this all down will help me see that it really is ridiculous or i'm just overreacting to how my weekends turn out.

remember my calendar, the big one my dad got me as a late birthday present? there was something for every day in june. now there's something for every day in july. back in the day, during my go! challenge, i decided that i would drive three hours to spend the weekend with my brother on campus at alma. he's living in the fraternity as usual and doing his creepy crawly spider research. mariah, my former roommate, is also up there doing turtle research, and i swear to god we were born to live together, so this was going to be a good weekend.

fun fun fun for everyone!

so. i set off on my three hour car journey in the rain. i have my own sheets because aaron advised me to bring my own. i have a pillow. i have my gigantic purple bag with everything i will need. i have my window down because everybody drives on the highway in the rain with their windows down, right? i listened to kanye west. it seems to take forever to get to michigan, and that's the short part of the drive. that's the less than an hour part.



after having spent nine months living in michigan, i have learned their radio stations. around coldwater i can totally pick up the ballin' indie station. that station is terrific. not only does it play indie music that i can never hear on the radio, but it spans the whole freakin' state. i listened to that station from the indiana border all the way to alma.

i spent the entire drive dancing to indie music (i almost blew out my speakers when little lion man came on i was that excited). i always have to pee because i drink dr. pepper whenever i drive more than two hours, and i had to stop at the rest stop that's one mile from the alma exit. i know. i'm pathetic.

as soon as i turned on superior street and had about ten miles to go, my phone goes off.

i answer it.

i know. i know. i get so mad at people who talk on their phones and drive. but i figure that if somebody is trying to call me while i'm driving to alma, it's pretty damn important. so i answered it and inwardly cursed myself for talking and driving.

it was the nice ONE lady asking if this was a good time for me to schedule my spinal injection. you read that correctly. that's a needle going into my spine that i have to schedule. so i weigh my options. is this a good time to schedule my appointment? if it's not, she'll probably call me back when i'm busy at alma with my phone lying on my brother's bedroom floor. so i tell her yes, this is fine.

she talks to me the whole drive into alma. and into the parking lot. and after i park the car behind the frat house. and as i'm moving my stuff into the frat house. she talks and talks and talks. and repeats herself a bunch. and then doesn't tell me what time my appointment actually is, just that i have to be there an hour early, and that i won't be able to drive myself home.

how scary is that?

zeta sigma fraternity!
upon entering the fraternity, i alert my parents that i have made it in one piece, i hum little lion man, and i climb the steep steps up my brother's room. he is nowhere to be seen. so i dump my stuff on his floor and call him. five times. and like a good brother, he doesn't answer. so i set off across campus to accost mariah, my beautiful roommate.

i catch her playing pool at the rec center. we wander into the science building and she shows me all of the snakes, lizards, turtles, the alligator, and then gigantic fish that roams the lobby named paco. paco likes pink shirts, i discovered. really likes them. i think he's a piranha. and he's terrifically giganto.

mariah dropped me back off at zeta (the fraternity for those of you who don't know that zeta is a greek letter) and my brother gives me a big hug and says, i'm taking you out to dinner at the bar because they don't card until nine o'clock and it's FRIDAY!

i, of course, am twenty, and after nine o'clock, would not be let in. so this is perfect. and all aaron has to eat is ramen. the life of a college kid.

so aaron and biggie (i do not know his real name. true story.) and i walk downtown to the bar. i get a water. biggie gets some form of drink with lots of vodka. aaron orders one of those tall, perfectly amber beers that you only see in movies. he gets a large cheeseburger. biggie gets some form of chicken wrap. i get cheese quesadillas. the evening continues. my back begins to hurt. my brother has now had three of these perfectly amber beers. mariah is due to pick me up for some hardcore roommate bonding. so i walk back to the frat house by myself around seven thirty. i smell like grease and my hair is getting flat. i do not see my brother again until the next morning.

after running into max and playing with the kitten that he's babysitting, mariah picks me up in her truck and we drive to her professor's house. he's in ecuador and she's living there, taking care of his four dogs, one cat, and three parrots. you can hear the squawking outside. and down the street. i have a gigantic bag full of criminal minds and chuck DVDs for our viewing pleasure. there is a gigantic dog trying to jump on me and a huge parrot named jet sitting on my shoulder squawking his head off while mariah and i try to work the television. which completely fails.

so we drive back to campus and crash the south campus lobby.

we actually watched season 4.
no with no squawking birds and dogs and cats to make me sneeze, we put our feet up on a table and plow our way through criminal minds. hotch gets blown up, prentiss and reid get held hostage by a cult, and then reid gets anthrax. but we don't care because we're having way too much fun just sitting on a couch and talking about our summers and our excitement for RA training and how much we freakin' miss each other. this is the most normal part of my weekend.

mariah drops me back off at zeta after giving me a gigantic mariah-hug at midnight, and aaron is not in his room. his room has a gigantic lofted bed, and i'm supposed to be sleeping on it. his roommate has some grody sheets on there, so i spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to get to them. i finally wobble on aaron's desk, which is not able to support my weight for forever long, and i throw the sheets on the floor. i knock off a couple of empty beer bottles and his laundry money in the process. i then spend half an hour trying to make the damn bed with my own sheets. there is just no good way to get onto the loft, there's a gigantic cabinet nailed to the loft, and brandon (the roommate) has a lot of other stuff lying around.

i will not talk about the bathroom in the fraternity. it is too gross to write about.

the mattress was about as comfortable as a two by four. i slept badly. i woke up at least five times, and every time i did, i checked under the bunk for my brother. he never showed up.

i was woken up at nine fifteen by the drumline across the street and i missed marching band. then i realized i really had to poop and i was not about to do that at the frat.

so i took my shower stuff, crossed the street, and snuck into the athletic building.

this is the athletic building. :)
it was very exciting, sneaking around the athletic building with my shoes off to remain quiet. the locker room was open (the swimming one was not) and i took a nice shower. i sang loudly. i pooped. i did my hair. i looked for my swim coach. i ran and hid from two athletic tours like i was a CIA spy. i then wandered around campus and snuck into my old dorm building. i didn't get very far; there were recarpeting the entire building and it smelled terrible.

after an hour of wandering around campus, i came back to the fraternity and found my brother completely sacked out on his bed, utterly oblivious to the drumline and the fact that it was almost eleven o'clock. so i hijacked his computer and sent a #pooptweet, talking about the excitement of me breaking into the athletic building to find a decent place to take a shit.

when my brother finally roused himself, he explained that he had the spent the night at an alum's house because he had not been sober enough to walk back to the fraternity. i told him i had broken into the althetic building and probably walked two miles around campus and that was i slightly disappointed, because we were supposed to hang out and have fun.

he grumbled about his hangover.

thus i did not stay in alma as long as i had planned. i packed up my things (after aaron cooked me a frozen pizza for lunch) and headed back to indiana, happy i had gotten to wander around campus and bond with mariah, and slightly upset that my brother had decided to get trashed the one weekend i came to visit. but then again, i think he gets trashed just about every weekend.

to make the drive home quick: this really angry minivan passed me twenty miles away from alma. halfway home i accidentally pressed a bad button and had to pull over and call my dad (he fixed it!) and that put me fifteen minutes behind. i passed that van again in indiana, 140 miles later, and i did not change my cruising speed at all. i like my car to go 74 on the highway. so i'm not really sure what was up with that van.

i'm not sure if i did this weekend justice. it's hard to explain how you feel when you're trying to get a television to work with a gigantic hairy dog jumping on you and a bird sitting on your shoulder. mostly you just pray it doesn't poop on you. it's also hard to describe the really terrifying/liberating feeling of sneaking around the gigantic athletic building, holding your shoes, and checking around corners to get to the locker room undetected.

these things don't happen to me all that often. but situations that feel the same way happen to me all the time.

i think my life is ridiculous. i think this blog is very long. i applaud you for reading it.

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