PORTLAND: the story of STD convention.

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

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

typical me.

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

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

i hope that made you laugh.

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

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

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

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

ANYWHOO. 

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

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

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

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

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

i know. perfect for me.

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

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

swag.

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

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

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

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

NOM.

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

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

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

INSTANT. FOODGASM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tim: WHAAAAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

we left our own.

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

THIS.

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

portland day one = success.

portland day two = PRESENTATIONS.

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

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

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

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

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

uh, yeah i can.

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

i cannot even describe voodoo doughnuts.

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

we got a voodoo dozen.

 

OM NOM NOM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fuggin' portland, man.

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

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

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

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

alpha alpha pi. with creepy dude.

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

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

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

i'm really fun on narcotics, guys.

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

it was truly an adventure.

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

PORTLAND. :)

nighttime portland!

that's me. presenting my poetry. WOO.

erika, me, and christina at the gala dinner!

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

portland. was. AWESOME.

PORTLAND.

THE OSCARS!

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

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

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

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

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

you can thank me later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

that and i also tweet uncomfortable things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

well played, lord voldemort, well played.

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

jaws music.

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

this promptly showed up on tumblr with this caption:

"YOUR SPEECH IS TOO LONG MOTHERFUCKER"

that happened.

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

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

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

it really was suggested.

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

wrong. it was not adele. i was disappointed.

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

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

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

damn straight we were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

then it was les miserables.

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

and then there's me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

uhhhhhh.

THEN THERE WAS A TIE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

moving forward.

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

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

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

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

so. capslock. best actress.

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

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

excitement is bad for spelling.

then it was best actor.

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

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

the oscar went to daniel day-lewis.

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

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

then michelle obama skyped in to read best picture.

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

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

i was pissed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it was awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i bought two without thinking about it.

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

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

annalise and i!

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

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

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

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

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

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

i am invincible and i matter.

jamie tworkowski.
i love this man.

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

there is god in music.

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

then anis mojgani came on stage.

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

anis mojgani. check it out.

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

JON FOREMAN.

have you heard of jon foreman? probably not.

have you heard of switchfoot?

now you've heard of jon foreman.

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

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

we are.

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

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

I WAS HUNGRY.

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

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

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

doughnut. om nom nom.

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

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

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

while we drive back to alma, we are invincible.

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

she agrees.

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

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

we are adventuring.

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

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

capitol. one in the morning.

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

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

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

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

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

i cannot do it.

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

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

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

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

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

you are a story. and you matter.

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

HEAVY AND LIGHT.

jon foreman was a badass.

st. andrew's.

annalise and i ate the capitol. :)

THE HOBBIT.

if you're as smart as you look, you know what this post is going to be about.

i'm having a lot of hobbit feels. a lot. and by a lot i mean my entire tumblr right now is nothing but the hobbit and i want to climb richard armitage's lonely mountain. if you know what i mean.

i stole that line from a witty person on tumblr. i never would've come up with that myself.

oh, here's my warning.

THIS IS GOING TO BE NOTHING BUT SPOILERS AND STUFF BUT YOU SHOULD READ IT ANYWAY BECAUSE IT'S MOSTLY JUST ME SHARING MY INTENSE FEELINGS ABOUT LORD OF THE RINGS AND I DON'T THINK I'LL RUIN TOO MUCH OF ANYTHING AND I NEED TO LEARN TO TURN OFF MY CAPSLOCK.

right. like, i don't think i'll actually spoil anything? except maybe like, the basic premise of the movie?

maybe. let's begin.

so this actually begins with me laying around in my room watching breaking bad and drinking wine alone in my room on a thursday night, because we all know that the best time to drink is alone in your room on a thursday night. this is like, the fourth time i've done this and i feel like it's a sure sign of alcoholism.

so walter from breaking bad was blowing up some bad guys and cooking some awesome crystal and getting sick from chemotherapy and i was like, man, what if my dad was a meth cooker like walter and then jacob (the boyfriend not the best friend) was like, SURPRISE IT'S ELEVEN AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!

sometime over the summer.

me: the hobbit comes out in december!
jacob: we're seeing it at midnight!
me: what if i have an exam on friday morning? it's finals week.
jacob: uh. don't care.
me: but-
jacob: DID YOU HEAR ME, WOMAN?

he didn't say that last line. but we were going to the hobbit at midnight no matter what.

we bought our hobbit tickets in the same trip that bought me the wine that got me through the first season of breaking bad without vomiting. because a guy literally melts through pinkman's ceiling at one point and i really think that alcohol was the only thing that got me through it.

so at eleven thirty we head over to my car, slipping in the lovely snow that alma has and i'm incredibly excited. like, i get excited about everything.

when i say i get excited, i mean i get excited. i twitch. i tremble. i jump. i wring my hands. i flail my arms. i make inhuman noises. i scream and make highpitched whistling sounds.

i. cannot. control. excitement. it's a problem.

so i'm driving and squealing and shaking and jacob is just sitting in the passenger seat like, whatever, man. and i'm like, HOW ARE YOU NOT EXCITED and he's like, yo i'm totally excited and i'm like, YOU ARE NOT PHYSICALLY SHAKING ENOUGH TO BE EXCITED! and then the rest of the ride i yelled HOBBIT HOBBIT HOBBIT and flailed my arms until jacob was like, emily hold onto the steering wheel, you're driving a car.

so we get to alma's little theatre and who's it full of?

jacob's PMA brothers.

we take our seats. nobody rips our tickets, so technically we could've snuck in, but we're honest, decent people. the theatre is PACKED with alma students. we find a spot for two between a huge throng of jacob's brothers and some of their friends who are girls (not to say that they don't have girlfriends.) and we have half an hour to wait. i'm practically having a seizure i'm so excited, which is saying something, because i actually have seizures in real life.

and then, after an agonizing wait in which jacob and i see that there are an average of two RAs per building staff in the theatre, the movie starts and i'm about to pee my pants.

my first reaction is that ian holm's face is a lot fatter than it is in the fellowship of the ring and i'm trying not to let it bother me. and then frodo shows up and i'm like, well that's weird, i'm so used to him in that outfit he wore ALL THREE MOVIES and then frodo's like, hey bilbo, i'm going to go wait for gandalf in the woods and surprise him!

and then my heart melted into a gigantic puddle of feels from the fellowship.

i should back up. i skipped the part about the dwarf kingdom that got demolished by a dragon that you never actually see. which was really crafty on peter jackson's part.

anyway, ian holm transforms into martin freeman and of course, i fangirled really hard. here's a conversation to help you understand.

me: MARTIN FREEMAN IS PLAYING BILBO! EEEE!
my dad: who?
me: martin freeman, daddy!
my dad: who's that?
me: he plays dr. john watson in sherlock!
my mom: elementary?
me: NO. SHERLOCK. THE BRITISH TV SHOW.
my parents: oh. right. you watch british TV because you want to be british.
me: MARTIN FREEEEMAN

so of course, he's adorable as a hobbit. and dwarves start showing up and they're making a mess and bilbo's doing exactly what i do in any situation: panic.

and then it gets quiet and there's a knock on the door and gandalf whispers, "he is here."

who is here?! i can't figure out who's here. i'm excited. who's at bilbo's house?!

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DWARF ON THE FACE OF THE PLANET.

UNFFFFFFFF.

that would be thorin oakenshield. or thorin son of thrain. that's so much fun to say out loud. thorin son of thrain.

THORIN.

thorin is kingly. he has a deep voice. he's a badass warrior. and he can sing.

so the whole movie i'm like, i'm attracted to a dwarf. dwarves aren't supposed to be pretty. but oh my GOD do i want this dwarf. ahhh is this normal?!

tumblr alerted me that yes, it is normal. i feel better about being attracted to a dwarf now.

so the whole gist of the movie is that thorin, twelve other dwarves, gandalf and bilbo set out to reclaim the kingdom that was overtaken by the nasty dragon. it's an adventure story! hooray!

bilbo has no idea what he's doing. at one point he falls into a crevice and the dwarves are like, welp, he's dead, let's move on. he falls off a cliff at one point and thorin is like, ugh, gotta save your ass now, stupid hobbit in the middle of a thunderstorm. he gets sneezed on by a mountain troll and he has absolutely no idea how to wield his sword.

the dwarves, on the other hand, are like, badass fighters. thorin is the best of them all, having defeated this giant scary orc named azog. i was looking at azog and i was like, man, he really looks like the tree fawn in pan's labyrinth and then in the credits it was like, guillermo del toro and i was like, WHAT UP. I WAS RIGHT.

but anyway, azog is this big ass pale orc that's like, gigantic and mean and speaks an ugly language and rides a huge white warg and he's like, i killed thorin's dad and his grandpa, i want thorin's head so we're going to hunt them the whole movie because i just really hate thorin's family and thorin cut off my arm and that makes me sad inside.

halfway through the movie there's a huge repulsive giant goblin and i just wanted to vomit every time i looked at him. he's absolutely disgusting.

and caves! the dwarves are always going into caves! and bad things happen when they go into caves and halfway through the movie i was like, yo, thorin, another cave? not a good idea, bro.

and then there's gollum. bilbo falls into a crevice and all the dwarves are like, we can't find bilbo but that's okay because we're being attacked by these crazy goblins and we're going to DIE and bilbo is like, what's around this corner?! AND IT'S GOLLUM FUGGIN' BEATING A GOBLIN TO DEATH AND EATING IT WITH HIS BARE HANDS.

oh, and then gollum appears out of nowhere and his eyes GLOW IN THE DARK and he spends like, ten minutes discussing ways to eat bilbo and bilbo is like, i am about to be eaten by a scrawny thing that speaks in this awkward third person and who the hell is precious?

and then we all know that bilbo takes the ring. when gollum found out that bilbo had the ring, i have never been more terrified for a movie character in my entire life.

eventually azog made another appearance and actually spoke english, so that was cool. but then all the dwarves were hanging over a cliff by a tree and azog was like, BRING ME THORIN'S HEAD and i was like, NOOOOO THORIN MY EYE CANDY and there was some legit amount of time that i thought that thorin was dead and i may or may not have cried, which really means that i did.

AND RADAGAST.

picture an old man completely high out of his mind and keeping a bird's nest in his hat.

that's radagast.

he also has a wooden sleigh drawn by giant talking rabbits. he's like... santa of the forest. he also has pet hedgehogs. he might be my spirit animal.

so we all know that the hobbit is being made into three movies, and the first one was two hours and fifty minutes long. some of it was boring and i almost fell asleep, but i was seeing it at midnight, to be fair. even though it's a long movie, there's still two more, and we all know what that means.

it ended. rather abruptly.

so all the dwarves are on a rock and thorin is like, hey bilbo, you're actually not a worthless stupid hobbit and then it's like

DIRECTED BY PETER JACKSON

and i was like, NOOOOOOOO IT CAN'T BE OVER

me: WHAT. NO. 

jacob: let's go, i have a splitting headache, it's three in the morning.

me: I NEED MORE

jacob: please, let's just leave

me: NOOOO IT CAN'T END LIKE THAT

and i legitimately cried. i hugged jacob around the middle and sobbed into his shirt for a good two minutes before he finally dragged me out of the theatre and made me drive back to campus.

in short, i loved the hobbit. it was awesome. it gave me so many feels. 

i posted "i never thought i could be incredibly attracted to a dwarf" on tumblr and it has like, forty notes, which is awesome. tumblr famous!

i want to go see again. of course, i'm saving my money, so i'm not going to see it like, eighteen times like i did with spiderman and the avengers. but now that i'm home, i will make sure that my parents go see it with me.

i'll leave you with this.

that's right, bilbo. you go on your adventure.

AND DON'T DIE IN THE LAST MOVIE, I WON'T BE ABLE TO HANDLE THAT.

that fantastic day i had wires sticking out of my head. during hell week.

aaaaand we're live at procrastination station!

aka my carrel that's not really my carrel. i'm treating it like it is my own. which means i left a huge pile of my books there during lunch where i shouldn't have had those two cups of dr. pepper.

it's the week before finals, which brings to mind my list of LAST year's week before finals when i was furiously writing a five page paper in spanish.

right now i'm writing a five page paper in chicago style formatting, which is almost as painful.

because it's the week before finals, i obviously had to blog about it for student life, and you can find that here.

so here's a list, because all of my blogs have a list.

THINGS EMILY SHOULD BE DOING.

1. finishing her five page paper on hemophilia, rasputin, and the fall of the romanovs.
2. writing her seven page paper on beowulf.

both of these papers are due tomorrow. in the morning.

THINGS EMILY IS DOING.

1. drinking a really delicious vitamin water.
2. blogging. obviously.
3. wearing a cute dress.
4. having too much fun with her iphone.
5. listening to fun. their old album. before they were cool.

here's another list of acceptable things to do during the week before finals, and it will actually get to the point of this blog.

ACCEPTABLE THINGS TO DO DURING THE WEEK BEFORE FINALS.

1. drink wine alone in your room and cry.
2. watch spiderman too many times and want to marry andrew garfield.
3. make your residents goodie bags and wish you had an RA to make one for you but you can't because you're the RA and you're afraid of eating all the candy yourself alone in your room.
4. take showers three times a day and cry in them.
5. have awkward wires sticking out of your head.

number five is the premise of this blog.

right. so we all know the routine of "emily's been having seizures but they're not actually seizures we don't think but seizure is so much easier to say than convulsions, so emily's been having seizures and nobody knows why", right? of course we do.

so my bloodwork is clean, i don't have lupus or AIDS or some scary autoimmune disease, so what's the next step?

a 24 hour EEG, of course.

an EEG is where they hook wires up all of your head and watch your brainwaves. i had one in the hospital, but it was only for an hour. this was for twenty-four.

i had specific instructions i had to follow before the procedure, which happened on tuesday, the day that i was planning on being ultra productive and writing at least one of my two papers that's due tomorrow morning. instead i slept in, was extremely nervous, and spent a lot of lunch time whimpering. instructions: i wasn't allowed to put anything weird in my hair, such as hairspray. or bows.

i wear hairspray every single day of my life. i also wear a bow every single day of my life.

it was awkward.

i drove to mount pleasant where i didn't have quite as much gas as i thought, and i found my neurologist's office, which is in the middle of nowhere but down the street from target. i was wearing a comfortable t-shirt like they instructed and my hair was woefully undone and bow-less. i brought my careworn copy of the order of the phoenix, i announced my presence, and read about harry putting his terribly aching hand in a bowl of essence of murtlap tentacles.

sounds spiffy.

every single person in the waiting room of my neurologist's office was a sad, overweight, older woman. apparently spry young college girls don't often see my neurologist.

a nice lady took me back into a special room with a special chair with a special towel on it. she told me her name, but i quickly forgot it, which made me feel bad, because she was super nice and we spent the next two hours together bonding.

have you ever had somebody draw on you with crayon? it doesn't show up unless you really dig that crayon in there.

i hope you haven't had somebody do this to you. it's really painful.

so this nice lady is taking this marker and she's rubbing it hard into my head, and it feels like she's trying to draw on me with crayon. she's parting my hair in different directions and really scrubbing it in there, and i figure if we're going to be here for a while, i might as well tell her half of my life story, so i start talking. then she's sticking glue over the spots that she's marked, including the giant red line going right down the middle of my forehead to my nose.

then she starts to tell me about this stuff called colodian. i'm not sure if it's spelled like that, but it's pronounced "cul-load-eon" so i figure i'll just spell it colodian and deal with the consequences of misspellings.

it smells horrible. she's putting it all over my scalp and in my hair. we're talking about how shitty the education system is and why i want to be a teacher and live in england, all that jazz. the colodian is cold. smelly. unhappy. my hair is sticking up in odd places. this lady is super nice and letting me talk her ear off.

then she's telling me that the colodian is this extra special glue so that the electrodes won't fall off my head when i'm having a seizure or when i'm sleeping. it takes forever to dry, so she's going to dry each electrode site with an air compressor.

it was a like a loud, scary dental instrument that puffed freezing air at my head. totally normal stuff.

the whole ordeal of sticking twenty-eight wires to my head with scary glue and an air compressor took two hours. and it wasn't done after that.

all twenty-eight wires, which were easter colored (pink, blue, purple, yellow, green) came together at the back of my neck, where they were funneled into an awkward fabric tube. that tube then ran into a heart monitor, which was held onto me by a shoulder harness. to keep the shoulder harness on, it connected to  a strap that went around my waist.

basically, i was wearing a giant seatbelt/guitar strap covered in wires.

after that, a cord leading from the heart monitor attached to the brainwave monitor, which was about the size of a video camera, like, the old ones from the nineties. THAT was put in a puffy fanny pack that sat around my hips.

all the cool kids wear fanny packs.

i was less than thrilled, but i figured hey, i've been through a lot worse than walking around campus with wires sticking out of my head and an awkward shoulder harness and a fanny pack. i was pretty chillax about the whole thing. the lady who stuck all the wires to my head and set me up in my straps told me that i was the most positive person she'd ever encountered that had a 24 hour EEG. she said that most people hid in their houses and didn't come out.

well, i have a life. and classes. and sorority sisters and stuff. i can't hide in my room. i have shit to do.

she gave me the basic rules of the EEG.

1. no showering.
2. no taking off any of the harnesses.
3. don't wear hats that are too tight.
4. no chewing gum or having hard candy.
5. no making out with the boyfriend. (honestly. this was a thing.)
6. if you have a seizure, press the button on the brain recorder.
7. fill out your event diary.

the event diary was pretty basic. i ate lunch at noon. i had a seizure at seven. i took my antidepressants at midnight. i took a nap at two.

basic stuff.

when i left the office with my head covered in wires and my shoulder harness and fanny pack secure, i distinctly heard the nice lady say to the nurse, "poor girl."

i'm not poor. i just have seizures and stuff.

of course, i have to have a picture of my harness, fanny pack, and a single wire sticking out of my hair.

holy 24 EEG, batman!

doesn't look too bad, right? that's because you can't see the gigantic electrodes on my forehead that are covered in gauze and the eighteen wires that are tucked neatly behind my ears.

it's also astonishing my large my nose ring is. i should probably downgrade.

it was weird, but i was excited to have a seizure, because it meant that i could push the happy button and then they'd actually know something about why i'm having awkward convulsions. so when i had a convulsion at midnight, i was like, PRAISE THE GOOD LORD I'M HAVING A CONVULSION and i pressed the happy button and when it was over, i fell asleep. which was awkward with the wires, the fanny pack, and the shoulder harness and heart montior.

so the next day i wake up for my eight thirty class and my hair is a hot mess. i have about twenty alfalfas chillin' on the top of my head. my bangs no longer have the capacity to hide the gigantic electrodes pasted to my forehead. and those wire bundles behind my ears have been freed and are sticking out and making a huge halo around my head. i'm not allowed to brush my hair or get it wet. i don't have a suitable hat.

i venture out into the real world wearing a shirt that i wore the day before and then slept in with my hair and my electrodes a hot mess. it was pretty glorious.

i wish i had taken a picture of the extraordinary bad hair day. i feel like it tops most of the bad hair days you've ever had. unless you woke up one day with the biggest afro in the world, and if you did that, then you're not having a bad hair day, you're just awesome.

finally, after three classes and a whole bunch of people staring at me and feeling gross, i drove like a maniac back to the office, where another lady that was nowhere near as nice started to take off all twenty-eight electrodes and all of the wires. she told me that colodian remover wasn't as smelly as colodian, but she lied.

that shit was disgusting.

it was also runny. it ran all down the sides of my face and she had to cover my eyes in a washcloth to prevent it from getting in my eyes. 

when i was electrode free, she patted my hair down with a wet towel and collected my event diary and told me i'd get my results back in january. i touched my hair, which was now spiked in strange directions. it was slimy. very slimy.

the whole drive back to alma, the terrible smell of the colodian remover filled up my car and i was extremely unhappy.

i got back to campus at five o'clock and the first thing i did was lock my door and jump in the shower. i could feel glue all over my head and my scalp and i scrubbed and scrubbed. did you know that you get can get sore behind your ears? it gets very tender there, especially when you scrape glue out from behind there with your fingernails. 

i washed my hair three times. when i dried my hair and went to go do it before dinner, i still found gigantic chunks of glue hiding all over my scalp. 

i spent most of my night class finding glue deposits with my hands and pulling it out. soon i was covered in little pieces of glue, which got all over my sweatshirt and my desk. one of my sisters asked me if it was snowing outside and i had gotten it in my hair.

nah, just pulling glue out of my hair.

i washed my hair twice this morning. i am still pulling glue out of my hair.

every girl's dream, especially during the week before finals, is to have wires glued to her head, be unable to wear cute hats to cover it up, and then be covered in sticky smelling goop that doesn't actually do its job when you finally get in the shower to get clean. i mean, this has to be everybody's dream.

right? right?

it certainly wasn't mine.

now you know a little bit of something about my adventurous life with my newfound convulsions and my week before finals.

until then, i get back to this.

so. much. rasputin.

FINALS WEEK, KIDS. LET'S DO THIS.