that's life.

i've had a lot of different experiences playing the game of life, but none quite like last night.

when i was little, back when we had a gigantic gateway desktop (it was the bomb) my brother and i had the computer game of life. i was always the brown haired lady with the pink shirt and i always married the brown hair blue-eyed guy. we would always end up, completely randomly, getting twins. i'd do my best to be a teacher because i've always wanted to be a teacher (except when i wanted to be a firefighter) and i'd always try to get a victorian house.

i have a thing for victorian houses.

i have played the actual board game of life. i did this two years ago with my oldest cousin, who is currently twenty-seven (or eight?) and a graduate of law school. we played with my brother. in the board game, you can choose a same-sex marriage and nobody will think twice. all i had to do was pluck a little pink girl out of the box and stick her in the passenger seat of my car.

when i played that day, i did not land on a square that said "have a baby!" i'm not sure how i feel about this piece of fate.

last night i played the game of life at RA training in a completely and utterly different manner. nobody quite knew how to play, only the facilitators, and they sat behind desks that were labeled with EMPLOYMENT, CAR DEALERSHIP, BANK, MARRIAGE, AND UNIVERSITY. we were each given a name tag with a code on it, and only the facilitators knew the code. when they read our name tags with the code, they were expected to treat us based on the code.

the object: go to each station and do the best you could.

as i found at the end, this is what my code signified.

Q- i was white.
7- i was extremely rich.
()- i was physically able.
#- i was a man.
$- i was heterosexual.
-- - i was literate.

so basically i had the best name tag in the entire game.

when i stood in line to get my degree, i had no idea what any of these symbols signified. i didn't want to push my luck, so i handed jenny my sheet and said, "i think i'll try for a bachelor's degree." she then smiled very widely and said, "oh i think you can get a professional degree, something above a PhD."

i wasn't going to say no to that.

and so it went. at every single station i did not have a single problem. the police, who patrolled around as we dealt with life, left me alone. i walked up and got a mercedes luxury car, no loan. i became a lawyer with a 200,000 salary no questions asked. i bought an expensive victorian house, no mortgage. my marriage was approved instantly. (as a heterosexual, i had a homosexual marriage because i always do that during the game of life, but nobody knew about it but me. my nametag had me as heterosexual, i just didn't know about it. i just wrote sarah's name on the marriage license. it turns out sarah was almost as high up as me but was homosexual and therefore denied a marriage in actuality.)

i got through the game in about ten minutes. i had everything filled out and i didn't know what to do. and then i started to understand exactly what was happening around me.

my boyfriend was trying to get employed and rai, who was behind the desk and manning it, was speaking to him extremely slowly and loudly. she kept saying, "how long have you been in the country? i'm not sure if i can get you a job because you pray five times a day. how do you feel about 9/11?"

my roommate mariah kept getting a form with gibberish on it everywhere she went. she came up to me and said, "i think i'm illiterate."

bobby was jailed permanently because he was disabled, asian, and possibly a terrorist.

the entire time this was happening, nobody knew why. we didn't know what our symbols meant. we were trying to figure out why we were being treated the way we were being treated, and it eventually began to fall into place when james informed me that he was a homosexual muslim woman. i learned that my boyfriend was a transgender muslim man, and the marriage licenser, bob, had told him that he needed a loan for surgery before he could get married, what did he possibly think about 9/11, and did anybody in his family own a gas station? anybody with a P (denoting being african american) was either ignored or asked about gang activity and theft.

and so it went on. i walked around and everywhere i went people were being asked the most ridiculous stereotypical questions and every single person who was illiterate was given a form of gibberish and sent away.

so i became what i was; a powerful rich white man with a law degree.

at first i stood around the jail and tried to bail people out. nate was nice in letting me bail people out, but he was very particular. i had to make sure that james had no terrorist affiliations, and when i threatened to get the DA involved, he let me release him. bobby was a lost cause. i think nate might've put him on death row. when i tried to barter rob out of jail with justin as the police, however, he threatened to throw me in jail for disturbing the peace. i went elsewhere to help people.

i latched onto mariah, who was illiterate. i told her that i would represent her to get a house and to get married. we were turned down by the real estate agent, who asked me if my house was everything that i dreamed it would be. she then handed mariah a gibberish sheet and sent us away. we then went to marriage and i crossed out the gibberish and wrote plain english. i told bob, the marriage licenser, that i had filled out of her paperwork as a literate lawyer, and bob then told me that i had filled it out incorrectly and threatened to throw us in jail.

then i met maggie at the height of my frustration.

nate came up to me and said, "i need someone to represent maggie here. the marriage licenser is accusing her of stealing a car and therefore will not let her get married." well i couldn't have this. maggie wanted to get married, damn it.

so i took maggie to car dealer, explained that i was a lawyer, and asked her to review her car licensing signature. she resigned it rather reluctantly and we went to bob, my new best friend and marriage licenser.

bob became aggressive the instant he saw me, claiming that whenever i showed up to defend people, the police were never around to arrest me. i then clearly spelled out that the car dealer had checked her signature, it had been resigned, and that maggie had not stolen the car. bob then proclaimed loudly that he did not think i was an actual lawyer, even though i showed him my credentials. i told maggie to wait and i hunted down nate.

nate, as a police officer, kindly explained to bob that he had asked me to represent maggie as a lawyer and that everything i stated was true, including my credentials. bob reluctantly let maggie get married.

at this point the game ended, and i was still angry. i had glided through life without any effort whatsoever, and i felt like i had not helped enough people. i could've grabbed somebody else to help with mariah's paperwork. i could've tried harder to bail bobby out of jail. i could've helped my wife get married by demanding a civil union. but i didn't.

so i had to sit down with my incredible salary, house, car, and lawyer status and participate in group discussion.

we learned what the numbers and symbols stood for and how the faciliators knew them. they had codes and cues to say unimaginable stereotypesthings to fit stereotypes to us. we talked about our setbacks and how we felt about our stereotypes. we talked about our frustrations. the biggest point that came up was this: who makes the society rules and stereotypes?

we do.

we let these things happen. we think these things. we sometimes speak these things. what happened to diversity? why do you have to be a rich, white, heterosexual male to get everything you want in life?

sarah, my wife, was a rich, white, homosexual female. she got everything she wanted in life except a degree (the college was religiously affiliated and would not accept homosexuality) and a marriage. annette was a rich, white, heterosexual woman. she got everything she wanted in terms of a degree and a marriage, but she was not allowed to buy a house or get a car without her husband present. whenever she said that her husband wasn't with her, she was denied and sent away for being a woman.

this stuff happens. we let it.

i honestly feel like i learned more out of this activity by being privileged than by being disabled, illiterate, and foreign. it opened my eyes to how easily everything fell into my lap and how everything else is a constant, constant struggle. the game of life was suddenly life altering.

i hope to get everything i want out of life. and i hope to help others get everything they want out of life as well.


post script: the best part of the game was when morgan came up to me and said, "i'm a teacher and i drive a ford." i told her, "that is my exact life plan in real life." because it is.


today is the day.

today was one of those days where i woke up in a panic.

there are a few reasons for this.

1. it was eleven thirty. i value my sleep.

2. i couldn't remember the name of the second track on the album "torches" by foster the people.

3. my mother had promised to bake me a cake for my 'going away pizza dinner' and she had baked no such cake. she was also working all day today, and tonight is my 'going away pizza dinner'.

4. i had five hours to bake that cake, do all my laundry, and pack everything i owned for college.

i currently have a little less than two hours in that five hour clock and i'm honestly feeling rather good.

i think i look like a watermelon. i am wearing green shorts and a pink tank top. my hair is sweaty. i'm out of breath. but there is finally room on my chair for me to sit on it and room on my desk for me to put my laptop back in its usual happy position on the keyboard pullout tray (from back when i had a desktop, remember desktops?).

i got up in a super rush. i showered super fast. i smeared toothpaste on my nose to try out a new trend. it hasn't worked so far, and i can still smell mint on my face. i ate a cheese bagel like lightning. i gobbled down an entire pint of blueberries. i have a blueberry addiction and i am terrified of getting cancer. it's rather genetic in my family.

i baked that funfetti cake like it was nobody's business while simultaneously washing my comforter. this is a big deal, because my washer is one of the scariests things in my house (and there are some scary things in the serial killer room in our basement). so many knobs and buttons and multicolored facets! but i was able to wash my comforter without my father. he does the laundry and the dishes.

my mother mows the lawn.

my mother, queen of all things baking, had told me a super secret on how to make cakes moist like wedding cakes, and she had told me that she was going to share this super secret with me while we baked the funfetti cake. there was one problem with this: she was at school until four, it was twelve thirty, and i had to leave to go drastically chop off my hair at four.

i am still debating this whole drastic chop off my hair bit. i have another three hours (approximately) to decide.

so i baked my cake alone while listening to torches, because that is all i have been listening to for the past week. there is another problem with this: it's such a good album and so dancey that i find myself dancing alone in my room and not doing what i'm supposed to do.

last year i left a week later than this to start my freshman year of college. i had a bunch of stuff. i had spent all my target gift card graduation money. i had cool stuff. i spent an entire week packing it into a tremendous pile. i felt prepared. everything was perfect.

this year is very different from last year. i go to school in michigan. i live in indiana. this automatically makes me eligible for free underground storange under my dorm (and a thousand dollar scholarship), so the day before i moved back home in april, my brother, my boyfriend and i moved a bunch of my stuff to that free underground storage. my brother has my fridge in his room at the frat house. i have a decent amount of stuff currently hiding in a lightless room. tomorrow when i unpack, i will be wary of spiders.

thus i thought that i didn't have that much stuff. no sir, it would mostly be clothes, and how long would that take to pack? just shove them in a bunch of trashbags and my suitcase. make sure i have all my textbooks. remember to pack my DVD player and my rug. don't forget the ipod and the ihome, pack the laptop up when you finally sign out of facebook, tumblr, and twitter for the evening. roll up your comforter. this should not take long.

today is the day i realized how much CLOTHING i own. and this is after i gave two trash bags to goodwill earlier this week.

i have a full suitcase and five trashbags full of clothes. i am still missing an entire dresser drawer. my dresser,which matches my old bed, is from the 1800's (we're so hardcore) and one of the knobs broke off of the bottom drawer. so my all of my competitive swimming gear and my shorts and pajama bottoms are currently stuck until my father can work his magic. there in lies another trashbag full of stuff.

i have at least fifty pairs of shoes in a gigantic box (and more in a bag). i have a HUGE box of books (harry potter is heavy, my friends), a schoolbag full of textbooks, a canvas bag full of my complete seasons of chuck, two seasons of criminal minds, and all of my disney movies. i have a box with my trashcan, DVD player, rug, my piggy bank full of laundry quarters, my swim team picture collage, my framed pictures, my electronic cords, my little desk knickknacks, and my infinite boxes of stride gum. i have another comforter because i have an extra bed to make. i have sheets and towels and toiletry items.  i have a gigantic floor lamp equipped with energy friendly lightbulbs because my dorm is the new green dorm. i have a new pod chair because the one i'm sitting on is well... old. and tan. and gross. and ripping.

there's more. i have a bass guitar. and a cello.

i really don't have time to be blogging about all the things i have to pack. i really don't. but i am exhausted, sweaty, and feel the need to alert you about how i am crunched for time packing things.

after i chop off my hair and eat pizza, we will load the crimson avenger, that beautiful fourteen year old minivan, with all of my stuff. i will then drop by to say goodbye to my grandparents and my cousin/sister (our mothers are sisters. we just wish we were too). i will try to remember my cell phone.

halfway to alma i will forget something and have to buy it at walmart.

i have been waiting for tomorrow for a long, long time. since i got back to indiana, really. my heart belongs at my college and there it will remain until i graduate and move on into the real world.

but i'm sure as hell going to put more in storage next year. or not buy as much crap that i think i need because i'm an RA. i don't have time to keep writing this blog. i have trashbags to move downstairs and hair to think about.

to cut or not to cut?

it's the small things.

jonathan morley wants me to blog more often.

so here i am, sitting in my chair drinking a gatorade, listening to mumford & sons, and wearing a high lighter yellow shirt that denotes that i enjoyed my AP chemistry class in high school.

i got home today after a three day weekend of being in michigan with my boyfriend. we went to lake michigan. we watched lord of the rings and quoted it like nerds. we made pasta. we climbed a driftwood tree.

we spent six hours making door decs.

this six hours of sitting at his dining room table, holding a pair of scissors and cursing the thickness of construction paper, inevitably marks a new and adult phase of my life.

i know how weird that sounds.

i should first address the issue of you possibly not knowing what a door dec is before i get too ahead of myself trying to be a blogger. you know those fun, cute, construction paper things stuck on your dorm door with your name on it in puffy paint?

that's a door dec.

so, making door decs (with or without my boyfriend) is a gigantic life transition into the adult world.

i am a resident assistant. RA. the cool person who makes neat hall programs. the bitch down the hall who wrote you up for drinking. the person you go to when you're homesick. that person who's excited about EVERY STINKING PROGRAM the college ever puts on. (we genuinely are.)

that's me.

i have not become an RA yet, technically. i was hired in april. i have my own room. i move in on saturday. from there i go through training.

i am unbelievably excited.

being an RA, well, it's the most responsible job on campus. i spent two months applying. i filled out an application. i made a resume. i went through a mock interview. i went through five hours of group processing with a hundred other hopefuls (all of whom i loved and i wish they all could have been hired too). i then had an actual interview with all five hall directors. then i waited for a month in agony before they emailed me to tell me congratulations.

i knew that i wanted to be an RA as soon as i figured out what an RA actually was. so maybe... tenth grade. i wanted to be the person who kept the hall safe, who had the extra key for when you locked yourself out of room when you showered (and then you stood there in your hallway in a towel cursing), who kept up the bulletin board, who planned hall events. i knew that this was what i wanted to do.

it wasn't the pay. it wasn't the having the room to myself. but those are big perks, believe me.

(this sounds incredibly like my summer job. you know, the fun responsible job that you love enough to do for free, but you really enjoy being paid.)

so. my first step of being a real RA, before going through a week of training next week, is to make door decs. this was an insurmountable task, my boyfriend and i thought. (what do ya know, he's an RA too.)

i have twenty-four residents, if my calculations are correct. i am also responsible for making a door dec for each of my RA team members, the other RAs on my part of campus and in my building. this is thirty door decs. thirty.

this doesn't sound too bad, except i am not artistic. i suppose i am, because i play six instruments and write novels, but when it comes to drawing and being creative on paper, my stick figures have genetic mutations.

so i decided to make a nice tree. you know, the kind with the big trunk that swoops up and the leaves are just a big bubble that looks like a cloud.

i did that. i drew it. i cut it out. and then i traced it. thirty times. then i cut out every single tree with my boyfriend's awkward almost but not quite left handed scissors at his dining room table while it stormed on saturday. my thumb and my forefinger are not happy with me. they won't be happy for me with a long time.

i had a list of my RA teammates, so i commenced to puffy paint their names onto my multicolored first grade trees. and i remembered about five of my residents who had told me excited in april that they were in my hall. i do not have a list of my residents yet. so i could only puffy paint fifteen of my first grade trees. the other half is waiting. my mother's puffy paint is cowering in the sewing room downstairs. it should tremble. when i get that list of residents, i will become a puffy paint master.

(this is not likely. i still have puffy paint on my wrists from saturday.)

so being a creative little kid for six hours (this is how long it took) is a new transition. the entire time i was cutting out these trees and puffy painting, i was becoming increasingly excited for training. this is a real job. a responsible job. a fun job. an adult job.

i. am. so. terrifically. excited.

i am also terrifically excited in the fact that something so incredible, like making door decs, indicates a significant life transition for me.

but honestly, i believe that the biggest life transitions for us as human beings are not the big things, but the small things.

rationalization complete.

so i did that thing again.

you know, the thing where i sit for fifteen minutes in front of a page that says SIGN UP NOW! and then i finally click on that happy button and make a new website.

what more do i need?

i HAD a myspace, but we don't talk about that, do we.

i have a facebook.

i have a twitter.

i have this.

now i have a tumblr.

i will admit, i did not spend as long deciding to make a tumblr as i did to make a twitter. i spent a lot more time deciding to create THIS than i did deciding to make a tumblr. i think i might have rushed into this prematurely.

but yet again, i have reasons. at least i think i do.

you know that justification thing we all do. you think, "okay. here are all the reasons i'm going to do this." and the only reason you're coming up with reasons is because you already know you're going to do it and you just need to justify it to yourself to make yourself feel better.

dean koontz can describe that feeling a bunch better than i can.

"but she was striving hard to rationalize it, because she had already made up her mind that this was what she was going to do."

like that.

so a tumblr is a second blog. i don't need a second blog. i have this one. it holds my go! challenge and so many happy things i've written down. i enjoy this blog. i love writing it. i love the fact that i even have it, however vain that sounds. i enjoy blogspot terrifically.

so why did i make a tumblr?

here comes my insane crazy rationalization, and oddly, it sounds a lot like my rationalization to get a twitter: tumblr is, yet again, more freeing.

here i write blogs. long ones. like the one i wrote yesterday about my weekend and the parrot. and that REALLY long one about the weekend with my boyfriend and the shifting gears and the taco bell and the premature guitar buying and the life aquatic.

on tumblr i post disembodied quotes and pictures and reblog things from other tumblrs and let people know that i am obsessed with the lion king and matthew gray gubler and e. e. cummings and strawberries and that i am superstitious about my underwear.

i don't do those kind of shenigans on here. this is my philosophy, my life, and how i put it down into words. tumblr is pictures and quotes and basically that awesome picture collage i made on walgreens.com.

tumblr defeated me for probably an hour. i think it is still crushing me under the weight of its "i am a new blog site and i am hard to use" fist, wherease blogspot was nice and simple. but i have since half crawled out from under tumblr's fist, and i have posted three things.

one is a picture of lolita. (stop judging. i can feel it.)

two is my testament to bringing the word 'terrific' back into terrific use.

three is a dr. spencer reid quote about murder that i have on a sticky note on my computer screen.

i have no followers. my tumblr is merely an hour old, has three random posts that don't really make much sense, and i'm not sure how to reblog things. or like things. i am following my next door neighbor from alma, but she probably doesn't know that i follow her yet, and just because i follow her doesn't mean that she will follow me.

this was a painful twitter realization for me last month.

do i need a tumblr in my life? absolutely not.

do i want tumblr in my life? i have absolutely no idea.

will i learn how to use tumblr eventually? absolutely. because i am persistent to the point of insanity.

so. if you do the tumblr thing, you can find me here.

yes. that's a coldplay lyric. did you think that runwhenyourun.blogspot.com wasn't a lyric? (and it's matchbox twenty. if you were wondering.)

rationalization complete.


"to get away with murder, you simply don' tell anyone." -- dr. spencer reid.

this is how my life works.

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

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

fun fun fun for everyone!

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





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

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

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

i answer it.

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

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

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

how scary is that?

zeta sigma fraternity!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we actually watched season 4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

this is the athletic building. :)

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

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

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

he grumbled about his hangover.

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

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

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

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

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

"i'm not finished!"

i've blogged about this before. please don't shoot me.

without sounding vain and crass, i'd like to say that i'm a decently smart individual. i graduated in the top three percent of my class. i am planning on conquering a foreign language in four years. i have a very bright plan for my hopefully very bright future. i'm going to college and getting over half of my thirty-eight thousand dollar tuition paid for because of academic prowess.
and i'm trying to reinstate the word terrific all on my own.

so i'd like to think i'm a decently smart individual.

therefore, i am smart enough to know that perfection does not exist.

however, i am not smart enough to realize that i cannot achieve said perfection, because i sure as hell am trying to achieve it.

once again, i've started a blog with a seemingly pointless introduction (and with worthless things about myself, even!) just to finally get to the actual point of my blog and that point is three words: rondo. alla. turca.

mozart's turkish march.

i've been in concert band long enough to know what a march is, and i spent all of those years playing trumpet, of all things. i'm still trying to figure out how rondo alla turca is a march. to my ears, it doesn't sound like a march. the time signature is fine, but it really does seem to jump around. A minor. A major. F sharp minor (same key signature as A major!) and finally it just hangs out for a while in A major and ends there on a happy flourish.

i think it's part of a movement in A major. i'm not going to complain. A major is my favorite key. i'm nerdy enough to have a favorite key. to listen to and to play in.

if you read my previous blog way back in my go! challenge about how practice makes perfect and how nobody likes to practice unless you're the epitome of musicianship, then you know that i have been teaching myself this godforsaken march since may.

this is, in fact, a lie.

i know. how could i lie to you, my faithful reader? i sincerely apologize.

my mother stopped giving me piano lessons at the tender age of fourteen or fifteen, most likely fifteen, but she did point me in the right direction with rondo alla turca. we had been working on it. i had loudly rejected a terrible piece by bach after refusing to practice it for three months (she finally said to me, "FINE. DON'T PRACTICE. DON'T PLAY IT. I GIVE UP ON YOU.") and thus we moved onto rondo alla turca. i got a good page in. that's the part that people recognize, the A minor part, and then it moves smoothly into the three times repeated A major part that is the most fun to play.

then she stopped giving me lessons.

i had the first page memorized. one of my few and far between skills is memorizing music at an incredibly quick rate. i kept it lodged in my brain. when somebody talked about rondo alla turca, i'd sit down and blast my way through the first page, playing it fast enough that nobody would notice that i could hardly play it at all. i could play the right hand (incorrectly, i later learned) of the second page, the part that nobody knows exists. (if you don't even know what rondo alla turca sounds like and feel stupid right now, don't. some people just aren't mozart people. and of course i'm going to post a video of it at the end of this blog... if it ever ends.)


so i've had the first page of rondo alla turca up my sleeve for a good five years. at least four and a half. occasionally, during my busy high school years, i would sit down at the piano and plink around on that nasty second page, the F sharp minor that disguised itself as A major through key signature, and i thought, hmm. this looks increasingly difficult.




octaves from hell.

 the third page is the exact same as the first except for the beautiful A major repeated part. that had a slight change. and it turns out that it was the hardest part of the damn song. i thought, well, i'll never be able to play this, those are some nasty octaves from hell.

and then, this past may, i sat down and told myself that i would do this.

i have since memorized the song. i rarely look at the music, only if i want to directly pinpoint an accent or make sure that my dynamics are exactly correct. i have conquered those octaves from hell. i can sit down and play rondo alla turca.

but i can't feel good about it.

this is where the part about perfection comes in. i've been teaching myself this song all stinkin' summer and i won't quit practicing it. the other day, after playing it for nearly an hour, i said in a very exasperated voice, "i absolutely hate this song." my father replied, "then why do you keep playing it?" to which my response was, "it's not finished!"

when it will be finished, i have no idea.

if i am indeed trying to achieve perfection, i'm going to be playing this song for the rest of my life. perfection does not exist. i will never achieve perfection. but i do believe that i can always play it better than i did last time, and that there is some magic thing i can do to make this happen.

there are so many variables that affect my ability to play it better than last time. my fingernails can be too long and clack on the keys. my hand can itch. my fingers might not be sufficiently warmed up. they might be freezing. they might be too warm and sticky. i might have to pee halfway through the song. my foot can slip off the pedal. i might lean too far forward at a certain point (i do tend to move with the music).

there's also another variable i did not foresee. i know the song well enough i can think about other things while i play it. this works well for other songs, in fact, it's rather fun. i can be playing and then look down and say, "oh look, i'm almost done, how did that happen?" it's a different story with rondo alla turca. the first two lines are repeated twice. then the next three twice. then the second page is repeated in chunks. then the third page. the only page that doesn't have a single repeat is the last page.

occasionally i will lose my train of thought and then think to myself: how many times have i played this? once? twice? god forbid three times? then i know i'm not practicing correctly.

music has so many variables that depend on the musician. i am not perfect. therefore the piece cannot be.

i am not a professional pianist. i'm not a prodigy. i will never play it as well as a professional or a child prodigy. i'm just a twenty year old girl who took piano lessons from her mother and suddenly became manic when she returned from her first year of college with the conviction that she would learn mozart's turkish march.

i'm not sure what i was thinking.

for those of you who are still saying, "was i really supposed to have heard of rondo alla turca and i just missed that part of my education?" here is what it sounds like. i've posted this on my previous blog. hopefully, by the time i'm ninety-eight, i'll be able to play it this well.

for your listening pleasure. :)

i'll wear a red hat for blogging.

this morning for breakfast i ate a gigantic bowl of regular cheerios.

none of that honey nut crap. i eat real cheerios.

while i was eating my bowl of terrific regular cheerios, i was reading the newspaper. i'm one of those weird people who actually reads the newspaper because in my house, unless chuck or criminal minds is on, the TV stays off. i don't need a woman with too much makeup to tell me the news when i can read it for myself in the morning on my own time.

in the living section, i was reading about a professional blogger. which is why i guess i'm blogging.

remember when i wrote about how i read that article about blogging on wikihow?

yeah, me neither.

but i read that nice long article about how to blog and how to get your blog to attract attention and all of those other things. way at the bottom there was something about getting your blog noticed and possibly how to get paid for blogging.

the profession "professional blogger" astounds me.

don't get me wrong, it sounds absolutely fantastic to sit here and blog (like i'm doing right now at the kitchen nook with my spanish homework all over the table) and get paid for it. but how does this work? what exactly is the income?

i really like that commercial about the shrimp blogger. he travels the world, samples shrimp, and blogs about it. he's a professional blogger. but i'm wondering: where on earth is his money to travel the world and eat expensive shrimp? and could i possibly find a different reason to travel the world and blog, because i'm allergic to shrimp? it's so unfortunate, because i really do enjoy eating shrimp.

i've sat and thought about the wonderful things i could blog about. i mean, a blog is really supposed to have a trend. i could start another blog simply about spanish. and world language. and my quest to become fluent and study abroad in spain when i'm twenty-one. but i instead i just write disjointed horrible blogs that a few of you read.

i have no hope of achieving professional blogger status.

but this still raises questions for me. how does one become a professional blogger? is it really as fun as commercials depict it? if i actually became a professional blogger (pray that doesn't happen for everyone's sanity), what would i blog about? and my number one question:

if i actually became a professional blogger, would i end up forcing myself to pop out crappy blogs just to get paid because i'd rather be blogging about dumb things like this instead of what i'm actually supposed to be blogging about?

yikes. so many questions. so many times i've typed some variation of the word blog.

i am hunting for the infinitive "to blog" in spanish. when i find it (or create it!) i will have a little dance party.

if i were to become a professional blogger, i think my number once thing that i would blog about would be music. out of all of the things that i am absolutely in love with, music has to be the most passionate. i also recently got spotify. if you love music and don't have spotify, i suggest you get it. NOW.

there is a flaw with this concept: i have absolutely no idea how to review music. or movies. or... well... anything. i'm not a critic. i'm a college kid with a blog that nobody reads. i have no critiquing experience. so how on earth would i be able to listen to good music and then blog about its terrificness or terribleness?

yet again, professional blogger status slips through my grasp.

i think i'm okay with this. i'm going to college to become a teacher. but it would be very nice to be an adventurer. you know, travel the world and just write about stuff. it would be pretty fantastic. mostly just to travel the world.

new goal: travel the world and blog without being a professional blogger. just blog.

if i were a professional blogger, i would want to be steve zissou. because he sure knows about adventure. i really just want his hat.