Sunday, January 29, 2012

this post is a lot like fight club.

it's an absolute crime that i haven't blogged in so long.

the only thing that i've wanted to blog about for the past two weeks has been recruitment.

recruitment is a lot like fight club.

the first rule about recruitment is that you don't talk about recruitment.

(if you're wondering, this is sorority recruitment. and it's hardcore enough that we have a manual. and something called "recruitment school". i will leave it at that.)

so then what was i to blog about? a serious question indeed.

i have decided to just blog about my life. it's what i do anyway. and i have suddenly become conscious about how many sentences i start with "so" when i blog.

so. (aha.) here we go with my life. again.

this is jacob and i getting ready to welcome new members into my sorority on friday.
i swear, my hair has never looked that good. and whaddyaknow, as soon as it was perfect, i ran outside screaming in my t-shirt, shorts and tights without a coat through the snow carrying a gatorade bottle full of glittering beads to shake at random cars. and with that, my hair was messed up.

and i think it was about the fourth coldest i've ever been in my life.

the first half hour in my walk-outs garb was okay. but once the excitement had worn off and i had to walk to stucchi's to get ice cream without a coat, nuh uh.


on wednesday i had a conversation with dr. aspinall, my reading writing and research professor, about what i should do my independent study on. i told him all about my lolita paper from last year and that i really wanted to delve into it, and he said that was perfectly acceptable, but probably only because lolita was such a dense book that to actually get into it you had to be a scholar.

he then told me that he was disappointed that i'm not going to grad school.

this has been an issue this year. everybody and their mother is going to grad school. i will graduate in april of 2014 from alma college with a degree in english and spanish, and i will have a teaching license to go teach in just about any state that takes a michigan license. grad school makes it harder for teachers to get jobs, it's more school (and nobody wants to be in school forever) and honestly, i just want to go teach and blog.

so no, i'm not going to grad school.

dr. aspinall then told me that he thought that jacob (the boyfriend, not the best friend) was walking jesus when it came to english. he then told me that anybody can slog through shakespeare. says the guy who has a degree. IN SHAKESPEARE. the man has a PhD. IN SHAKESPEARE.

on thursday i wrote a really interesting poem about the relationship that i have with my grandmother. it has a lot of violent imagery. i sent the poem to my father, since after all, it was about his mom. he called me yesterday to tell me that he didn't understand it at all, and that the beech tree i wrote about was actually a birch tree.

i told him that the next time he talked to me about chemistry, i was going to say "oh i don't do that, i'm an english major."

on friday, while i was running around outside in a t-shirt and sweater tights wearing too many red necklaces and clutching a homemade glittery noisemaker, chuck ended.

i will repeat this.

CHUCK ENDED.


sooo i haven't seen the season finale yet. like i said, i was out running around in the cold for my sorority and too excited to function. but when all the fun was over, i went back to jacob's room and i saw a picture of chuck on tumblr. this picture, to be exact.

when i realized that i wouldn't barricade my door at eight o'clock every monday to keep out unwanted visitors while watching a new episode, and that all i would have would be memories of bumbling chuck and cuddling with my mother on the couch while she knitted, i cried like a baby for half an hour.

i then promptly returned to my dorm, popped the best bag of popcorn i'd ever eaten, and watched the pilot episode like a person attending a funeral.

my mother recorded the series finale of chuck, and when i return home for the weekend in two weeks, i will watch it on my television. with commercials. my favorite television show will not end with me watching it on the internet on some sketchy website that has interesting pop up ads. you know what i mean by interesting.

now onto the RA things about my life. let's make a short list.

1. recruitment and RA things worked out just fine. which was good. because i was in tears.
2. i called the wrong AOD again. whoops.
3. nobody unthawed the doughnuts. that is a blog post in and of itself.
4. kait and i ran to the RA office in t-shirts (to avoid drunk people) to deliberate about the state of our hall director's 13x9 inch pans. at twelve thirty this morning.

so about the doughnuts. they had been frozen in the heavy duty RA freezer for god knows how long. we were giving them away in the library to promote the career and internship fair put on the ACP office, and nobody unthawed them. so when sarah and steph and i went into the RA office to grab them, they were nice and frozen.

we took them upstairs, put them in a pan (which i washed out in the public bathroom) and tried to put them in the oven. there was serious discussion of putting them in the dryer. sarah and i laughed. steph was pissed. other sarah helped. i ended up running to the library to guard the free hot chocolate machine.

this is what the hot chocolate looked like: you know in monsters inc. when mr. waternoose is gloomping coffee into his mug and you're instantly revolted? yeah, it looked like that. that hot chocolate was thick as all get out.

people came and ate our lukewarm doughnuts. i thought they tasted like pizza.

oh, I GOT A SMARTPHONE.


the first thing i did with it was download the free IMDB app and set my ringtone as the circle of life. so far i pretty much just use IMDB, facebook, and twitter. eventually i'll use my phone like a real person. getting a real-person phone that's probably smarter than me should warrant its own blog post, but honestly, i just haven't done enough with the damn thing to write that much about it. i'll let you know when i name it.

aaaaand i have officially gotten my teacher placement for this semester! and lo and behold, i'll be even more like a real teacher, because i have to be at the high school before eight. and the night before, my staff meetings go until midnight. real world, here i come! not barging through the door like a hero, but tripping on my dress pants in my high heels.

and i will end this blog with what i was supposed to be doing while i was writing this blog. i just read a terrific poem about a fish (that i read last year) and i am supposed to be analyzing it and writing a one page paper on the major theme that i discovered in said poem.

instead of writing the paper, i put on my header with my name, the class, the date, blah blah blah, and then i wrote myself a note that looks like this.


Hey Emily!

When you actually write this, you probably won’t be able to find your poetry notebook.

Here is what you’re writing this paper about!

PERCEPTION OF BEAUTY!

  • Bright colors and flowers (comparisons)
  • Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow!
  • Colors in general. Get specific.
  • Comparisons to birds. And stuff.
  • Ugliness = wisdom and worldliness.

NOW GO WRITE YOUR PAPER, YOU BEAUTIFUL GIRL!


this is my life in the past week. i hope that you've enjoyed it as much as i have.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

we, with our labeled lives, like literature?

this has the potential to get really weird really fast.

it also has a lot of ideas that i have in my head that are interconnected, but possibly only interconnected in my head.

please, bear with me while i jumble all of this together in a mad rush.

so yesterday was the first day of the semester, and my classes are looking something like this.

modern american literature. (thank goodness modern means after 1945.)
educational pyschology. (to understand students?)
reading, writing, and research. (that's exactly what it sounds like. reading. writing. and research.)
poetry workshop. (haven't been there yet. that's on thursday.)

so i'm going to start off by saying that ed psych is going to be interesting. at a school as small as mine, if you're in the education department, you all know each other. so my class is basically "alma's class of 2014 future teachers in the same room twice a week."

halfway through class i realized that room was my philosophy classroom from last semester. i just didn't recognize it because i hardly went to that class, and when i did, i sat in the very front and wrote down every funny thing dr. stratton said, including, "i think that granny smith apples are just about the most orgasmic things on the planet. have any of you ever had an orgasm? you don't have to raise your hands, just think about it and smile."

so american lit was the first class that i went to. i have it with dr. vivian, that fabulous creative writing professor that i've blogged about before. he opened the class with the same interesting poem, and once again, told us that we had to recite a poem in front of the class.

i am not allowed to use the same poem. i was highly distraught because i don't think another poem can fit into my life so neatly.

from there, he talked about all eleven text books (i currently have five of them) and how we were going to start reading "grasses of a thousand colors" by wallace shawn. now, don't tell me that you don't know who wallace shawn is.

he's the guy in the princess bride who yells INCONCEIVABLE! he's also the voice of rex in toy story.

if you still don't know who wallace shawn is, i am incredibly sorry that have you not seen either of those two movies.

so today, this play, "grasses of a thousand colors", comes in the mail, and i pick it up all happy because i have to have fifty pages read by wednesday, and whattyaknow, it's tuesday. so i start reading this play.

it's this guy. and he's standing on stage in his pajamas and he's just talking to his audience about whatever. i'm thinking that he's a very interesting person with some interesting insights. for instance, he talks about the audience as becoming a box of chocolates. i thought that was very strange and slightly illuminating.

and then suddenly he's a sex addict and there's five whole pages where he's talking about his relationship with his penis and he's having sex with a cat, and apparently, cat sex is so awesome that he orgasmed so much that he blacked out.

PLEASE. BEAR WITH ME. I AM AS CONFUSED AND DISTURBED AS YOU ARE.


so moving onto reading, writing, and research and forgetting that i ever typed any of that.

so dr. aspinall is one of my favorite professors even though i've never had him. i'm going to have the pleasure of traveling to europe with him when i'm twenty-one. he's well-loved throughout the campus. he's a shakespeare nut. he wears pink pants. it was my first class with him, and when jacob (the boyfriend not the best friend) and i walked into his class, we didn't know what to expect.

this class is going to take a lot out of me. i'm going to be writing concise, argumentative, and grammatically perfect one page papers twice a week. i'm going to be reading lots of strange (but not as strange as american lit) books. there will be much writing. there will be much reading. there will be much researching.

so on thursday he's going to give us the guidelines for our independent study project. we get to choose a book or a selection of poems to write a ten page paper on. we have nearly the entire semester to get this done.

my instant thought was lolita. i wrote a bombdiggity paper on lolita last winter semester about how quilty was a figment of humbert's imagination, a strange imaginary piece of himself that he created to be real so he could deal with the fact that he was a monster. by god, i loved that paper, and i loved writing it. and i love lolita.

but dr. aspinall encouraged us to branch out and do something that maybe we haven't done before. i'm still toying with the idea of going very in depth with the quilty not being real idea, so we'll see how that goes.

i've made a list of books i might be interested in doing. the third book on that list is "grasses of a thousand colors." pretty sure if i do that play, i'm going to vomit. everywhere.

before the class ended, our first one page assignment was to write about what makes an english major excel. everybody in that class is an english major or minor. what do we need to have to excel at english?

i sat with my shoes off, rocking my chair back and forth, while everybody was spouting articulate stuff like, "we must think critically, which means seeing literature this way." "we must have a nice canon!" (no. not like, boom canon. canon like, look at all these fancy classics i have on my shelf and that i've read.) "we must be original!" "we should have our own thoughts, be open to the thoughts of others, but not recklessly abandon our thoughts for the thoughts of others."

this went on for literally half an hour before i raised my hand and said, "i think we should like english."

it got really quiet when i said that.

i applaud every single one of my classmates for the nice and true articulate things that they said we needed to be good english students. but hello.

we gotta like literature.

what is the point of being an english major if you hate reading books? if you don't like to write? if you don't enjoy diving into a book and taking out its messy innards and writing complicated papers with eight million cited sources from scholars in obscure books? sure, we can think critically and be original and have great ideas and articulate well, but we have to actually like doing it.

i just wrote my one page paper about what makes us excellent english majors, and it was about how we, with our lives labeled as "english majors", must enjoy our subject, and once we have achieved love, we can find our own excellence. i know how pretentious that sounds. but as an english major in three english classes with three different professors to impress with three different styles of writing, i think i can be pretentious.

i highly doubt i'm going to do this big sha-bang paper on a sex addict who screws with cats. i'm probably going to do it on a french professor who's in love with his twelve year old step daughter and living in his own fantasy.

that doesn't sound much better, does it?

welcome to college. welcome to english.

welcome to life.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

punch, kick, here's your new chair!

so today is one of those days where i blog about my day.

my life is interesting. at least i'd like to think it is. which is why it's okay to blog about.

my life could be something like this:

1. today i woke up.
2. i ate breakfast.
3. i then had a criminal minds marathon until lunch, and then a chuck marathon until dinner.
4. then i spent hours and hours online on my various social networking sites.
5. i want to watch matthew gray gubler on the craig ferguson show. but i am too afraid to go into the basement alone in the dark at one in the morning.

i have had days like these. (ahem. yesterday.)

but today i had a very interesting day, and i deem it blog post worthy!

so today i woke up. late. like, almost going on noon late. but that was fine with me, because i had plans to go chair hunting, and i didn't feel like waiting around for that to happen.

here's how the chair hunting came about. i've had this pod chair for like, eight years. to make it comfy, i have a special array of pillows on blankets on it. so many blogs have some from this chair. novels. poetry. anything computer related comes from this chair.

sunday night, in the middle of watching a very potter musical, i was suddenly sitting on the ground.

emily, our intrepid life blogger, needed a new computer chair.

so my friend vince from high school (this is vince of the vomit incidents from last post. we never get dairy together anymore.) tells me that we can go chair shopping today. it'll be an adventure. i agreed. i've spent the last three days sitting on the floor with my laptop. it hasn't been the greatest thing for my ass.

so he came and picked me up at one. we got into my dad's almost fourteen year old minivan, put iron and wine in the CD player, and we ventured to goodwill.

and once there, there was this GLORIOUS pair of puke green armchairs. forty bucks each. i had christmas money. these chairs were fabulous. but i was looking for a pod chair, not a seventies armchair. so we decided that we would check target and if there was nothing there, we'd come back and get the puke green chair.

we drove to target. almost got in a car accident. upon entering the target parking lot, there was a cart sitting in the middle of the entrance. i dramatically screamed and veered around it. when i parked, i was about to go be a good civilian and put it back, but somebody in a creeper van got to it first. i really shouldn't hate on the creeper van. after all, i was driving my dad's minivan, which my brother's boyscout troup named "the crimson avenger" back in middle school. my high school marching band adopted that name my junior year of high school.

we wandered aimlessly around target. looked at an expensive leather chair. discussed the toothbrush holder that jacob and i have picked out in case we get married. found nothing that resembled my old computer chair.

alas, i had gotten my old chair at kohls. we drove to kohls. did not almost get in a car accident. but i didn't trip a green arrow and i shouted spanish obscenities and random nothings at the light. it was exciting. i like to yell.

once in kohls, an old man told us that vince's watch couldn't be fixed right away, and once we were upstairs, i found a beautiful monkey sheet set.

no chairs.

office depot was next. that went something like this.

office depot employee: can i help you?
me: yes, i'd like a computer chair.
office depot store as a whole: LOOK AT ALL OF THESE BEAUTIFUL EXPENSIVE COMPUTER CHAIRS THAT ONLY BUSINESSMEN CAN AFFORD.
me: back to goodwill.

once back at goodwill, we stared at the pair of chairs. one had a scary stain that looked a bit like vomit. i sat in the other one. bounced in it, because when i get excited by anything, i bounce and jump up and down. we turned it over and checked its innards. it was a solid chair.

i bought it for forty-two dollars and eighty cents. a nice employee struggled it to the back of the store and i picked it up at the donation loading dock. once vince had managed to pick it up, i couldn't get the trunk to the crimson avenger opened. i later found out this was because my father had already unlocked it and i had relocked it. go me.

we got the chair to fit in the van. we drove home. we managed to get it into my kitchen. then my mother looked at it and said, "euw, what is that?"

me: mother, this is my new chair!"

she sat in it. she loved it. and then told me i could reupholster it before i get my own apartment.

my dad and vince got it upstairs. i then showed vince the beauty that is dr. spencer reid saying, "this is calm, and it's doctor". then i took some febreeze and sprayed the crap out of it.

oh yes. my new chair.

but this blog post doesn't end here! oh no, there is more to my day than just chair adventures.

so my mom has decided that she wants to turn her life around. i'm not sure what she needs to turn around, because she's absolutely wonderful in every way shape and form, but she has decided to dabble in three fitness classes. one of them is at her sister's dance studio. my cousin, my mother, and i ventured there for zumba last night. now, i am a zumba veteran with a fourteen week zumba class under my belt, and it did not meet up to my standards.

today we went to this thing at the YMCA called turbo kick. my father endearingly calls it turbotax. we figured it would be like kick boxing. it would be fun.

so my mother and i show up and the instructor is all like, "who's new?" and we raise our hands. she then laughs and says, "wow, not many people admit that." then she turns on this techno music. and the hell starts.

i am not afraid of hard work. i am (was) a collegiate athlete in the longest sports season of the year with the hardest sport. i am in shape. i understand how hard work goes. but i was not expecting this at all. i was drenched in sweat in five minutes.

these women are kicking and punching like the end of "i'll make a man out of you" in mulan. they know the routines. kick punch spin jump kick punch punch punch lunge go go go! faster faster faster FASTEST!

and that's when i realize how uncoordinated i am. my mother is more uncoordinated. i'm trying to punch the right way, and by the time i get it, these women are jumping the other direction kicking at everything. the lady next to me is practically kicking me in the face. i look at my mom for a fraction of a second while doing some form of upper cut and her eyes say this: what the hell did we just do.

it was a fantastic work out. i will give it that. i sweated a lot. i was out of breath. i drained my water bottle. the instructor kept smiling at me while i fumbled around trying to kick and punch at things, and her smile was a little too telling: you have no idea what you just got into. to make matters a bit worse, this girl in the front must have been some super-hybrid dancer/gymnast, because she was leaping and punching and generally defying the rules of gravity. during my fourteen week zumba class, i felt like how that girl looked while doing zumba.

but i probably looked like the idiot that i am. that's okay. zumba was amazing fun.

we were so tired and sweaty and embarrassed after that workout that we walked around the track. my mother kept saying, "we'll just walk until i stop sweating!" while we tried to stop perspiring, my mother enthusiastically talked about how she was so excited about this class and eventually she'd become coordinated and get all of it down.

me: i ain't goin' back. nuh uh.
my mother: you should transfer to IPFW and go to all these fitness classes with me!
me: fuggetaboutit.

i will stick with zumba. at least i know i can semi-reasonably dance. or pretend to. when i go back to school on saturday, i will have to ask my mother how turbo kick (turbotax!) is going. tomorrow we're going to another zumba class.

i hope it's better than the last one.

yep. i am not this coordinated.


Sunday, January 1, 2012

the list.

well, i'm going to be cliche and say happy new year!

(and a belated happy eighty-fifth birthday to lord voldemort. that was my facebook status and it got eight likes.)

this is my facebook status as of one o'clock this morning.


i'm pretty proud of it.

so normally i get on facebook right at midnight and write a list of the awesome/amazing/terrific/odd things i did in 2011. there are fifty. numero cincuenta (that's fifty) is always the same. then i post it as a note and tag all my friends that were involved in my yearly shenanigans and then they all say things like this.

"i remember number thirty-three!"
"oh that was so much fun."
"you did WHAT?"

and my friend vince will undoubtedly say, "i'm always in the ones where you throw up."

but this year, because i have a blog and i rather enjoy my blog, and i'm guessing you do too because you're reading it right now, i'm going to make it on here.

so here we go, the list of awesome/amazing/terrific/odd things i did in the year 2011.

THE LIST.

1. i got a twitter. @emilyyxh. honestly, my tweets aren't fantastic. but i tweet anyway. and far too often.
2. i got a tumblr. athousandhouseslong.tumblr.com. i'm rather proud of it.
3. oh yeah, i got this thing.
4. with it, i blogged every day in the month of june! go me!
5. i turned twenty. i'm not sure why that's a big deal. but i was way excited about it.
6. i learned how to drive a stick shift.
7. while learning, my boyfriend's stick shift died. we got it towed.
8. again, while learning, he got a flat tire. this was two weeks later.
9. i set foot in a taco bell after i vowed not to. so much for resolutions.
10. i fell in love with a literary pedophile. comment if you want an explanation.
11. i rented a car all by myself. and drove it all by myself.
12. i changed clothes in the back of that car. at the parking lot of my work. where i work with children.
13. i bought a cello and named him estlin!
14. i memorized my favorite e. e. cummings poem and recited it for my creative writing class.
15. i saw the lion king in theatres. and it was one of the most fantastic moments of my life.
16. i became a resident assistant! and i love my job so so so so much.
17. i joined the greatest sorority ever, gamma phi beta. i love all of my sisters so much. :)
18. i discovered criminal minds. i don't think that needs an explanation.
19. i subsequently fell in love with the character dr. spencer reid.
20. i subsequently fell in love with the actor who portrays him, matthew gray gubler.
21. i lost my black friday virginity. there's a blog post about that.
22. i spent over half of my summer in a back brace.
23. i got a spinal injection that involved four needles.
24. harry potter ended. but it didn't end for me. because magic never dies.
25. i took two summer college classes. that was fun...?
26. i finished my collegiate swim season. i love the ACSD. i really do.
27. i did ballet in a parking lot while my boyfriend jacked up his car. for the third time.
28. i struggled and struggled trying to write my book. which is now a fat 494 pages and going nowhere.
29. i spent three weeks living in my house. by myself. going to work and cooking and being a real person.
30. i celebrated a wonderful one year with my terrific boyfriend, jacob hammer.
31. i danced on the shores of lake michigan and saw the biggest harvest moon i'd ever seen in my life.
32. i called the cops. twice.
33. while plunging my bathroom toilet in my dorm, it flooded. into my bedroom.
34. i crammed myself into a miserably small box and fell asleep there outside on the chapel lawn.
35. i discovered i was a hipster. i was genuinely surprised.
36. i got a fish and named him gabberdine!
37. i took a bass guitar home over the summer with the intention of learning it. guess how far that went.
38. i experienced my first silent migraine during an organic chemistry lecture. that wasn't that fun.
39. i declared my major and minor. finally.
40. i got to work in a high school classroom with real kids. like a real teacher.
41. i was hit on by one of those real kids.
42. i took a zumba class. i didn't know i could shake what my momma gave me. i didn't think she gave me anything.
43. i held my boyfriend's hand.
44. i owled. on a mountain.
45. i got thrown up on at cedar point.
46. while visiting my brother at school over the summer, i had a bird ride my shoulder, and i snuck into the athletic building to poop. there's a blog post about that too.  (and half the things on this list...)
47. i finally taught myself rondo alla turca.
48. i told my college president that i liked his tie at a barbecue. after telling him about the ugliest tie that i owned (brown with peach colored sea bass), he took his off and gave it to me. i felt like i was blessed by god.
49. i wrote a research paper about illiteracy in colombia. in spanish.
50. i lived.


see, i told you that number fifty is always the same.

it's 2012 now, and it has been for an hour and a half, at least eastern standard time. everybody says that 2011 went by too quickly, and yes, it did. but time waits for no man.

that got way philosophical. too much philosophy class last semester.

so anyway, that was my list. i swear, it gets more boring every year. i need to go streaking again.

happy 2012 kids. make it count.