graduation cake, bursted blood vessels, and some customer service complaints.

i've had a really eventful day.

guess what? you're going to hear about it! OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY.

so it starts off with how i went to work and i heard one of my favorite rap songs on the radio. but i'll talk about that later.

friday at the swim team that i coach at is fun friday. and hannah and emma and i had decided that we were going to get in the water with the kids, yes yes we were.

so we get to practice and we take the lane lines OUT. so the kids have the freedom to swim about. where we tell them to, of course. i can't loosen the lane lines. i get the wrench stuck. then i drop the wrench. then i give up and scream that i'm a failure. hannah and emma laugh and give me hugs.

we're becoming best friends.

so we send the kids swimming in circles around the pool. these kids range from ages eleven to sixteen. i think parker is sixteen. i should ask him about stuff like that.

so anyway, about halfway through practice hannah and emma and i strip down to our swim suits and we put on our caps. mine ripped. so i had to borrow a carroll cap. a carroll cap. 


i went to northrop, people. you better know it.

anyway.

so we get in and we swim around the pool with the kids for a while, and then somebody suggests that we play sharks and minnows.

here's the run down.

1. somebody's a shark. they tread water in the diving well. the minnows line up on the outside of the pool. out of the pool.
2. the shark says minnows away.
3. the minnows dive in and swim to the other side (the width. not the length) of the pool underwater.
4. the shark has to drag the minnows to the surface before they touch the wall. if this happens, the minnow becomes a shark until there is one minnow left.
5. the only rules are no biting, no suit pulling, no strangling, and no hair pulling.

we don't mess around with sharks and minnows. and hannah and emma and i, well, we're veterans.

i haven't played sharks and minnows since i was about eighteen. so i was excited. and out of shape.

bailey was our first shark. he starts catching the younger swimmers. hannah, emma, me, and some older kids are almost impossible to get. a running start from us pushes us almost all the way across the pool. and even though it kills my ears, i go deep. and i do not give up. i will wrestle with you underwater and occasionally forget the no biting rule.

we don't mess around with sharks and minnows.

so bailey began to realize that hannah and emma and i were getting tired. dive in, swim underwater, throw off some children, and then jack ourselves out of the pool. so he began to call minnows away as soon as we got out.

my dear readers, i am out of shape. and i cannot haul myself out of the deep end of a pool without a ladder as well as i used to.

parker eventually let himself get caught and one by one, he took us out. my intense underwater struggles were futile and all they got me was a slightly bloody mouth as he shouldered it.

after sharks and minnows with the older kids, it was time for practice with the little kids, the four to ten year olds.

we had thirty-six of them.


that's a lot of kids for four coaches and a lifeguard.

about ten minutes into practice it felt like my ear was bleeding through my cap. i touched it and it wasn't bleeding, and then it became unbearably hot. hannah checked it out.

i had burst some blood vessels.

like i said. we take sharks and minnows seriously.

after doing ring around the rosey with a cute six year old named charlie on my hip, i went home and wrote a rather strongly worded complaint to the FCC. you know, the radio and television regulation people.

on the way to work, i heard "monster" by kanye west on the radio. i love the song. i've been listening to it for two years. i work out to it. it's a profane song. i had never heard it on the radio before, and it was edited.

they did not edit out the phrase "rape and pillage a village of women and children."

i'm sorry. but as a feminist and as someone who knows rape victims, i believe that this is highly inappropriate and destructive.

i understand about free speech. i understand about music. i'm a music enthusiast. music is art. art cannot and should never be contained. but when you are listening to music on the radio, you understand that it is edited. and i believe that that song was edited improperly.

if you are a rape victim, you do not need to hear that on radio to remind you of it.

this is something i feel very strongly about. and i will not be silent about it.

i don't want to put a disclaimer on this. you can disagree with me all you want. but we are being raised in a rape culture where we teach women how to not be raped instead of teaching men not to rape women. nobody can stop this culture in music. but it can be stopped on the radio where things should be safely edited. where they're supposed to be safely edited.

now onto a lighter and happier part of my blog.

my beautiful cousin, adrienne, had her grad party at my house this evening. she lives in california most of the year, so our house was the hot spot for a small family gathering with pizza and...

casa salad.


if you don't live in fort wayne, you don't have casa. i am so sorry. because casa salad is the best damn salad you will ever have in your life, and it's catered.

there will be casa salad at my wedding.

look how clean it is! :)

i spent most of the day cleaning my room.

cleaning means i have to wear my teacher dress.

bonus points for me: i didn't have to change for the party.

soooo most of the party was adrienne's dad's side of the family. which isn't my side of the family, because adrienne's mom and my mom are sisters. when people started arriving, i hid on the porch with my dad until he had to go pick up the pizza. we didn't know many of these people.

i said this about twenty times:

"i just finished my sophomore year at alma college, i'm studying english and spanish education. i'm applying to study abroad in spain in the fall. i'm an RA. i'm coaching a swim team this summer. oh, where's my brother? he's studying spider behavior. no. sexual behavior. it's awkward."

my brother, the arachnologist. studying horny male spiders.

it was a fun filled evening full of too much pizza, which made me feel that my ab workout that i did was useless. i found this calendar thing for getting mean abs by doing this thing every day. it's got a june a schedule, and i was like, oh man, this is just like blogging. blogging, crunches. blogging, sit ups.

i wasn't ready for the push ups. i also swam a mile and a half, and i haven't swam since like... february of 2011, so i am sore as HELL.

anyway, it was a super pleasant evening with relatives. and stuff. some people i didn't know told me that i had a beautiful house. i do live on a pond behind a chocolate factory, so i guess that's magical.

i also live between a hospital and a funeral home. still not sure how i feel about that.

the evening ended with my cousin jessica and my aunt booty popping in my parents' bedroom and adrienne drowning herself in my perfume. in my room. i think that my guitar is going to smell like bath and body works for a good month every time i pick it up.

around the time that everybody left, my grandpa (we call him popsi. don't ask.) asked me if i had a compulsion to blog. i had to explain to him that i wanted to be a better blogger, so last year i decided to see if i could blog every day in the month of june, and now it's june again, so i might as well do it again.

but i do blog kind of compulsively.

i asked him what i should blog about it and he says, "well just blog about your day."

blog about my day accomplished.

now i'm going to show you adorable pictures of my family.

this is me and my daddy.
he's the coolest cat. ever.

this is me and my momma.
i'm seven inches taller than her.
but i'll never be as cool.

this is my family, minus my two cousins, my brother, and my uncle.
from left: my aunt beth, popsi, adrienne, uncle jim in the back, my grandma,
me, my mom, my dad, and jessica.

i really love my family. :)