the day that i broke both of my heels. at the same time.

i suppose it's time for me to blog about the heels breaking incident of 2008.

this is exactly what it sounds like.

as you probably know, i'm a competitive swimmer. well, i was. i'm totally not anymore, not after swimming in college completely screwed up my back and at this rate i'm not getting it fixed any time soon.

competitive swimming timeline:

age four- prep team.
age five- big team.
ages five to sixteen- swim summer for blackhawk swim team.
ages seven to fourteen- swim winter swim at FWCY.
age fifteen- swim winter at TRAC.
age sixteen to eighteen- swim ALL THE SEASONS at NACS.
age eighteen to nineteen- swim and simulataneously coach autumn ridge.
age nineteen- swim college at alma.

i skipped high school. i swam in high school. on top of all this other stuff.

a typical winter season is from september until when high school starts (early november). high school goes from then until the beginning of february. then winter swimming continues from then until the end of  march.

then summer starts in may and goes until august. summer means long course. long course means outside. long course means 50 meters instead of 25 yards.

high school swimming means FUN FUN FUN FOR EVERYONE!

honestly. i absolutely adored all four years of high school swimming. it was great. even the practices at five fifteen in the morning where i got up at four thirty to drive downtown to practice. because i always bought doughnuts afterward. i really like doughnuts.

but here's the story of the heels breaking incident of 2008.

2008-2009 is my junior year of high school. i'm seventeen. my brother is a senior. he's eighteen. it's december 11th, 2008, and we're headed downtown to a swim meet against southside, if i do remember correctly.

so my junior year of high school is my awkward metal phase? so aaron and i are listening to disturbed. of all things, we're listening to distubed and we're driving to this meet and it's snowing. we're driving separately from my parents, because after meets, the team goes to wendy's to celebrate and eat burgers, and meets end around nine, and my parents want to go home and sleep.

so we're driving to this swim meet, and i remember this very vividly. this guy doesn't put on his turn signal and he's trying to turn in front us, causing us to wait behind him. by now we can't get around him without backing up, and he's just sitting in this intersection in the ghetto. seriously, in the ghetto. so aaron rolls down his window and screams something that i can't put on my blog.

and then we laugh the rest of the mile to southside. (yes. we swim downtown. in the ghetto. but we have one of the nicest pools in indiana, so no judgin'.)

for those of you that don't understand anything about swimming or swim meets, here's a fast tutorial.

there's an event called the 100 freestyle. or front crawl, if you're a cave person. that's four laps. after that event, there's a ten minute break where we can warm up.

then it's the 100 butterfly. or the michael phelps stroke.

the 100 fly is kind of sort of my thing.

so during the ten minute break i was warming up, getting ready to dominate. i didn't really have any competition from southside, and i was the only one from my team, and i was like, this'll be fun, i can just race the clock. so i'm just warming up, swimming some laps, gettin' pumped.

and then i see my good friend taylor sitting on the wall minding his own business.

and i think to myself, if i do a really hard flipturn, i can splash him and it'll be hilarious.

famous last words.

um. this is a flipturn.

it's not that great of a flipturn, but it gives you the point. so if you don't know what a flipturn is, watch it so you can understand the next part of this post.

right. so i'm going to do one of these and splash taylor. it'll be great.

i come in for the turn and i really crank my legs over, using all of my core strength, totally about to just dominate this turn and

SMACK.

i hit both of my heels on the metal edge of the pool.


i cannot properly explain to how much it fuggin' hurt.

so i surface and taylor is sitting there like "OMG ARE YOU OKAY EMILY ARE YOU OKAY" and i'm trying to not cry and i'm like, "yeah yeah i'm good i'm good" trying to channel my inner badassery, and inside i'm making this noise like a deflating cow.

i have an event in five minutes. i can't blow it. so i swim it off. shake it off. swim it off. it'll be fine. both of my feet hurt like hell, but it'll be fine, shake it off, swim it off, you're fine.

it's time for my event. i get out of the pool. ease myself onto the blocks. swim my race. win my race.

as soon as the adrenaline from my victory is gone, i crawl out of the pool like a slug, get to a bench, heave myself onto it... and start screaming.

the lifeguards come running over. i've already broken my foot in their pool and gotten my other foot lodged in a ladder, they know the drill. they stick each of my feet into a bucket of ice and tell me to sit. they fill out an incident report. i sit there and hug my towel and bawl my eyes out because i have never been in so much pain in entire life, and this is after my appendix exploded when i was eight.

i probably won't blog about that.

i scratched (that means i didn't swim) the rest of the meet. i couldn't walk to go to our after meet powwow. when i took my feet out of the ice buckets, both of them were purple and twice their normal size. i assured my coach that i had crutches at home (from the foot breaking incident of early 2008, that's not epic enough for a post) and that i'd be fine.

i walked out of the natatorium suspended between taylor and ryan. both of whom are least six foot four. that was a pretty big stretch for my arms.

so the next day was crutches and it was a friday, which means that i couldn't talk. (there's another post about how i didn't talk on fridays for six years!) so i couldn't tell anybody why i was on crutches. i got sick of writing it down, too. since both of my heels were busted, i'd crutch forward and then go onto my tip toes on both feet.

i've never seen anyone crutch like this to this day.

even on crutches with my feet in agony, i went to swim practice. turns out i could swim just fine, just couldn't walk.

i refused to do a flipturn.

and so the crutches went on for several weeks. by several i mean... something like... six to eight. christmas break was spent in a wheelchair. i crutched across three airports. my parents left me in my wheelchair in front of a painting in florida. i got taken on walks in the wheelchair. i sat in the shower every morning. i crawled to the bathroom and up to my bedroom.

and i still swam.

and baby, i made sectional finals.

i'm trying to picture what the other girls were thinking when i crutched up to the blocks for finals, knelt in front of the blocks, and did a half-assed start off the blocks at sectionals, the biggest meet of the high school season besides state. honestly. but i made finals. channeled the inner badassery.

just before sectionals, when it was clear that my heels weren't getting better, we went to a podiatrist. he gave me double aircasts.

you know, those big gray boots that you wear when you break your foot.

i had two.

please take a moment to appreciate this photo.

after sectionals was over, my parents didn't want me swimming. i was still afraid to do flipturns and i hadn't walked unaided in a good three months, so we just kept going with the aircasts.

i still crawled to the shower. aircasts make stairs very difficult, so i had to walk one step at a time, sideways, and holding the bannister. i became best friends with the school elevator. 

when my heels still weren't healing, i got an MRI. i had bruised my bone marrow. you read that right. i had broken my heels and bruised the bone marrow.

i should do a seminar in powerful flipturns. "how to make your turn rock the house."

finally, halfway through april, i took off my aircasts and found that my heels were almost completely better. then i had to relearn how to walk properly. then i had to wear heel inserts for two months and only wear tennis shoes.

but when i could wear shoes again, what did i do?

i bought myself a sixty dollar pair of converse, that's what i did. they're covered in sea creatures. and kind of fantastic.

the next week i went to new york city, where i did a lot of walking without my aircasts, which was bad. i wasn't allowed to sit at the top of the empire state building and the security guard yelled at me. i cried. when i stand for too long, my heels start to hurt. and they hurt the rest of the day.

this is me, aaron, and my daddy in new york. :)

i don't really know how to end this.

um. do good flipturns. don't break your heels, and not at the same time.

and if your friend is ever in a wheelchair and you take them on walks, sending them "bowling for trashcans" is not advised. my mother did that to me. everyday.

also, new york city is awesome.

"you have fun up there!"

i've been starting out a lot of posts with "remember when..." lately.

here we go.

remember all the way LAST june (2011. i know. forever ago.) and i was in a back brace and going to physical therapy and being an adult? and somewhere in there were a bunch of x-rays, an annoying MRI, a cavity filling, and a spinal injection?

never get a spinal injection. please. they tell you they numb your back. THEY TELL YOU. BUT IT'S NOT NUMB.

but anyway, that was my summer last year, remember that?

well if you don't, i certainly do.

so my cousin jessica started working full-time as this place called the woodhouse day spa, and our other cousin, adrienne is visiting this week from california, and we wanted a tour. from what we heard, this spa was like, super incredibly legit and practically built for royalty.

so last week we got a tour. an infinity pool. amazing spa rooms. an infinity pool. did i say that already? a quiet room to wait with your girlfriends before your massage. beverages. plastic surgery.


jessica, with her discount, booked adrienne and i for a fifty minute swedish massage today in the duet room. nothin' like gettin' a massage with your cousin.

i mean, i don't have a sister. so this was the next best thing. although i love my older brother dearly, i will not get a massage with him.

so adrienne and i showed up at two fifteen when jessica instructed, right when she got off work. then it was fun paperwork!

did i have anywhere that needed extra attention? my back.

did i have anywhere that caused me daily pain? let me think. my back.


after the paperwork was filled out, adrienne and i made a pact to leave on our underwear. it's customary to go completely naked underneath the massage robe, and jessica assured us that our therapists wouldn't see anything, but we made an underwear pact anyway.

sleeeeep time.
this is my only picture. sorry.

you don't break pacts like that, man. you just don't.

so we went into the HUGE changing room, found a locker, and slipped into our massage robes, which were white and fluffy. we held true to our underwear pact. then we were lead into a warm, dark room with cozy amber light that had a fire and relaxing music playing. it was labeled "women's quiet room" and i guess you sit there and be quiet before your massage.

adrienne and i sat on a couch. jessica joined us. adrienne and i each grabbed a pillow. and fell asleep.

then it was massage time.

my therapist's name was joe. he looked pretty good-natured. i told him straight up that under NO circumstances was he allowed to touch my heels, due to my heel breaking incident of 2008. you know, that day where i broke both of my heels at the same time and couldn't walk for five months.

i should blog about that.

when i told him that my back was nothing but a big mess of knots, he smiled. and i told him he could dig HARD.

the massage room was a small room with two beds, one for adrienne and one for me. we climbed on in, they dimmed the lights, and then suddenly joe was putting this weird night mask over my face.

and then he was massaging my head and i wanted to die of happiness.

i don't remember much of the actual massage, mostly because it felt so fantastic. it started with my head, then down to my shoulders, my upper back, and then each arm. then i got to roll over ungainly while trying not to reveal myself, and then it was my legs, and then my back.

so. i am not joking when i say that i have about twenty knots in my back, ten on each side of spine, one after another, from my neck to my butt. i just kind of live with it. my boyfriend has given me a three hour back massage on one specific area and he has not made a dent in these knots.

when joe started working on my back, you could hear him sigh. and i said, "have fun up there!"

after agonizingly wonderful pressure and knot relieving, they're still there, as big and as stubborn as ever.

once the massage was over and i felt oily, slimy, and exhausted, adrienne and i went back to the changing room where (separately!) we showered in this fantastically huge rainfall shower. it was like being in the greatest thunderstorm ever, but the rain was hot tub temperature and you were washing your hair.

"this is amazing! this is just like magic!"

um. i like gilderoy lockhart. he can always help explain easy to explain situations.

with my lovely friends and family discount and my tip to joe, who did not touch my heels and made my back feel about ten percent better, my total was seventy dollars.

so far, in the two weeks that i have been home, i have already spent a hundred and thirty on teacher clothes, and two hundred and sixty on my new ipod.

i am locking away my debit card where i won't find it until... until... august!


(i interrupt this blog to tell you that mufasa just died on my VHS. WHY DOES HE DIE EVERY TIME I WATCH THIS MOVIE. which is... about twice a day on average. WHY. we now continue with our regularly scheduled programming of emily blogging.)

so. i had my very first massage, i paid a bunch for it, now i'm broke, and you know what?

i am sore. as. hell.

at work tonight, when i was giving my older kids a breath control set (because i'm mean) my legs were extra super sore.

or maybe that was because my mom and i took a three mile power walk after dinner, where we saw three baby robins being torn to pieces by a dog and some crows.

then we found a dead fish in our flower bed.

must be the circle of life.

i'm just gonna leave this blog here. because it's kind of unsatisfactory, and mufasa is dead, and that makes me sad.

and my mother and i found a fish in our flower bed.

alma college christian leadership.

so remember that super long post that i wrote last month, where i talked about the titanic sinking and how i fell in a muddy ditch in the cold rain wth my boyfriend, and i ate some weird food and i learned how to chinese sword dance, and i read this awesome book and i watched lord of the rings entirely too much?

remember that post? and i talked about ACCL? remember? huh? HUH?

sure. of course you do.

so i vlogged today for the first time, because my ACCL friends and i have decided that in our facebook group, we're all going to vlog each other from our respective states. unfortunately, i'm not the first person to vlog from indiana. but anyway, i made a youtube account and i vlogged and i basically sat in my seventies arm chair and talked about my spring term and my birthday and how i got a new book and had a lion king and my boyfriend got me a storm trooper and how i was watching the lion king (which i'm watching now, go figure) and i was super awkward, had just gotten out of the shower, and hadn't even bothered doing my hair.

and then i said something awkward like "i think i'm going to blog about ACCL because it's my blog every day in june GO! challenge and um... i miss you guys."

and now that it's after dinner and i'm sitting here watching the lion king before work, i was like, "mannnn i need something to blog about, but nothing awesome happened today, i just sat on my porch and read blindness and listened to the new pornographers."

gosh this is the longest intro ever. I'M JUST GOING TO BLOG ABOUT ACCL.

so. ACCL (stop saying ay-cee-cee-el. it's excel.) started with everybody leaving campus and me being alone in my dorm building. and suddenly i realized that i was completely alone and i didn't know anybody staying for ACCL and i had that panic feeling that i get when i watch criminal minds at four in the morning, so i barricaded my door, called my mother on the phone, and cried.

i am a grown-ass woman, folks.

then i realized that all i had to eat for dinner was oatmeal. so like a grown-ass woman, i ordered my own pizza.

i spent the evening watching the lion king, and the next morning i woke up, went downstairs to make some oatmeal in the lobby and was confronted with vomit. ERRRYWHERE.

this was ACCL week. there was nobody on campus. i didn't have any residents. i was not going to be an RA. my hall director wasn't even around. and on my first morning of freedom, i had to be an RA. this did not bode well.

at four that afternoon, i went to the chapel basement, where i was instructed to go by my heavy duty schedule that looked like something from RA training. or church camp. and i found the rest of us sixteen ACCLers sitting on cushions on the floor.

we introduced ourselves by playing games. we talked about favorite kitchen appliances. i explained my strange almost obsession with spoons. because they're an appliance, right?

carol, our amazing chaplain, bought a whole bunch of food, and we had dinner. our three ACCL leaders, emmy, jennafer, and caitlin (a fellow RA of mine) split us into groups. each leader had two groups, a green and a purple. i was in emmy's purple group with justin and katie e. we called ourselves the phantom platypi, and we had dishes clean-up duty on friday, our last day of ACCL. we also had to lead two bible studies, starting the next day.

my bible study!
minus alyssa. :(

after dinner, i attended my first bible study, led by emmy. i had gotten an email from her, jennafer and caitlin, and they had told me that ACCL was super fun and that they thought i'd be perfect for it.

when i found out that it was about leading a bible study, i wanted to run with my tail between my legs. we had a session where we wrote our biggest fears about leading a bible study, and mine was this: if i've never been to a bible study, how on earth am i supposed to LEAD one?


the silence after that was read anonymously was palpable. or maybe that was just me freaking out.

ACCL got us up bright and early for breakfast in the chapel basement at eight thirty. we did fun energizers that involved screaming and shouting, and we did a devotional. i'd never had one of those either, at least not outside of church camp. then we had class time with our college president.

president abernathy, or as i like to call him, the abs, is pretty legit. i live next to his house. his kids are adorable. he's an english professor. he rides his bike around campus. he kayaks. he knows my name, my major, and that i'm an RA. basically, he's awesome.

but it's really weird when he's like, "okay, let's take out our bibles and talk about jesus!"

that whole concept was weird for me. i'm not an overly religious person. in my family, religion is kind of a private thing. and here at ACCL, everything was about jesus. we prayed before and after every activity. we meditated. we read our bibles. we recited scriptures.

i felt like a novice monk.

on monday afternoon, we had "safe play" training, where we had partners that navigated us through an obstacle course while we were blindfolded. i absolutely love being blindfolded because of kip, so was i very excited. we then crossed a river with planks while having various ailments: my legs were tied together and justin had his hands behind his back. and we had a human knot record of the year.

let this sink in for a minute.

1. we undid a human knot in less than a minute.
2. we undid a human knot in less than a minute without speaking.
3. we undid a human knot with half of the group blindfolded. those who we were not blindfolded could not speak. those who were blindfolded could.

ACCL jump before soccer!

yeah, we were pretty badass.

tuesday was once again bright and early, with fun energizers, devotionals, and class time. after lunch we played hardcore soccer and did various soccer games and drills with the soccer coach. it made me realize how terrible i was at soccer, and then i wondered why on earth my mother was qualified to coach my third grade soccer team.

afterwards, we sat on the chapel steps and ate popsicles.

by now we'd known each other for two days, and we were already bests friends in christ. that is not a sentimental statement. that is a solid fact.

that night we all ate dinner at carol's house, and it was one of the greatest dinners of my life.

on wednesday we got up reeeal early and went to habitat for humanity in mt. pleasant for our service project. i was kind of expecting to be on a roof nailing something, you know, building a house, but did you know that habitat for humanity has something called restore? it's kind of like goodwill. so if you're broke and need anything and everything for a house, check one out. i promise you, it'll be worth it.

we spent a good three hours clearing a storage building out. we moved hundreds of windows and... ceiling tiles. we moved hundreds upon hundreds of ceiling tiles onto a truck. we made an assembly line and sang camp songs, choked on dust, wore awkward gloves, and praised jesus when we worked together to move heavy pieces of furniture.

we're a good looking bunch. can you find me?
i'm the only one in a cardigan.

honestly, i don't remember our afternoon activity, but i know that we took our ACCL picture. we continued to talk about leading small groups and of course, had bible studies. that night for dinner we had a service dinner. you were not allowed to get anything for yourself, and you were not allowed to ask for anything. you had to be perceptive of the needs of those around you.

it was cool.

on thursday, after class, devotions, bible reading, and suicide prevention training (because even people that go to bible studies can be suicidal), we went to the park. we had a bonfire and we roasted hot dogs (veggie burgers for me) and we lost ourselves on the playground. i mean really lost ourselves. i have never felt so wild and free and in love with god in my entire life as i did running around screaming and swinging with my new best friends. it was a one of a kind experience, climbing all over the playground equipment.

and i slack-lined.

slack-lining.
like a boss.

justin (he's on the right) and his marvelous camera documented the whole thing. we took group pictures, we just had a so much fun it shouldn't have even been allowed.

friday was our last day. we got up early, ate breakfast, had our devotionals, had one last class time, had lunch, and we spent the afternoon singing and writing stuff on each other's pieces of paper. encouragements, prayers, anything. we had a puzzle where we wrote our strengths and weaknesses, and when the puzzle fit together, they complemented each other. we got in a circle and we prayed together about the awesome week that we had had, and how it come to a close too soon. we made bracelets to remind us of each other. we said tearful goodbyes.

ACCL was over. and it had been one of the greatest experiences of my life.

so, i'm going to leave you with some pictures of the week. and my vlog. in case you want to see what i said to my lovely ACCL friends.

veggie burger. on a stick.

strengths and weaknesses.

phantom platypi! unite!
with popsicles?

to all my ACCL loves, i love you more than i can explain. you guys are super amazing people. and i'm so happy that we got to spend this week together. :)

oh. here's my awkward vlog.

it wasn't a three this time.

so i'm sitting on my screeneed in porch, and jacob (the boyfriend not the best friend) is playing his guitar and singing something and it's thunderstorming and i'm looking for a rainbow and simultaneously taking an instagram picture when i realize

IT'S JUNE. I GOTTA BLOG TODAY.

if it's only the second day, this doesn't bode well for my go! challenge.

so far my day has consisted of nothing blog worthy.

1. i got up.
2. i ate some cheerios.
3. i showered.
4. i FINALLY unpacked my room.
5. i ate some lunch.
6. i fell asleep watching the royal tenenbaums. which really bummed me out, because i've wanted to watch that movie for four years, and suddenly i wake up and richie is trying to commit suicide.

oh man. if that was a huge spoiler, i'm deeply sorry. but not sorry enough to delete it.

absolutely nothing blog worthy.

so this kind of has to do with my birthday, which is tomorrow. tomorrow is a sunday. my last birthday on a sunday was my sixteenth birthday, and now it's my twenty-first. here's the thing about sundays.

1. stores are closed.
2. jacob has to go back to michigan.
3. i don't have to work. i suppose that's a good thing on my birthday. the last time i worked, my kids pushed me in the pool. with my clothes on. that was my eighteenth.
4. you have to go to church.

don't get me wrong. i love church. but in the summer, who wants to get up that early?

so i decided that my birthday celebration would be on saturday. that's today. unless you live in australia or something. and if you do, that's really cool, and you should write me a letter and we can be pen pals.

my aunt owns this really sweet dance studio. she totally like, built it from the ground up ten years ago. today is her dance recital, which is like, the biggest three day weekend of her life, and normally we have to help sell tickets, flowers, concessions, what have you. that means no birthday celebration for me. it also meant that she didn't get to come to my graduation. but that's okay. when you own a business, you pretty much rock.

jacob and i managed to squeeze out of selling dance recital tickets, or flowers (or candy like last year) by saying that we were going bowling to celebrate my birthday because you just can't properly celebrate a birthday on sunday.

initially, like, five months before today, i had decided that i wanted a big birthday party and all of my friends could come down from michigan and we could go bowling and have milkshakes and it would just be super awesome!

and then i remembered that we're all broke college students and everybody except me lives in michigan.

so jacob and i went bowling by ourselves.

first stop: my old house.

i am the only person in my family that is creepy and sentimental about my old house. i lived there for sixteen years and sixteen days, and i absolutely loved it. my mom and i had our favorite walking route, so jacob and i embarked on it, parking a good distance away from my old house so we weren't being creepy. i was thoroughly upset that they had removed the tree that i spen my summers reading harry potter in.

yes. i was one of those girls that read books in trees.

after i gave jacob the in-depth tour ("that house used to be yellow. that guy gave out good halloween candy. my best friend lived on this street. AH I JUST TRIPPED ON THE SIDWALK") we went to georgetown, which was pretty much like... childhood. back in the day, my mom and my brother and i would walk to the library, we'd stop at the mill and get bread, and sometimes we'd look at the puppies in the pet shop. on wednesday's the theatre had movies for fifty cents. and of course, we'd get ice cream at TCBY yogurt.

it was obvious that TCBY hadn't had a customer in a while. the college-aged girl that was in there looked so happy to see us i thought that she would cry. i have never been wished a good evening that enthusiastically by a food services employee in my life.

after jacob got distracted by the pipe store, we managed to go bowling.

the lady that gave us our shoes and took my money turned out to be an aide in my first grade classroom, and she remembered me. never mind that first grade was a good fourteen years ago. she knew my name and everything. when i told her that i just finished my second year of college, was going to go study abroad, and had gotten an internship, she just shook her head and said, "damn it i'm old."

she gave us a lane next to what looked like a seven year old's birthday party.

why we hadn't gotten a lane in the nearly empty other side of the bowling alley was beyond me.

this is where i want to remind you, my beloved reader, that bowling is not my thing. at all. i do believe that i have bowled a lower score than you can ever hope to achieve in your lifetime.

that's right. i bowled a three.  three pins. the entire game.


i was determined to beat jacob in bowling. but you know, when it comes to beating someone in bowling, that just never works out for me.

there was a four year old bowling next to me. he got a better score than i did. granted, he had bumpers. but still. he was also wayyy cuter than me.

i was very happy to learn that bowling isn't jacob's forte either, and i got decently competitive. jacob is not at all a competitive person, and every time that i got angry because of how i'd bowled or how he'd bowled, he just smiled and gave me a kiss on the nose. because that's supposed to make me feel better.

i was very happy that we had matching shoes, and when jacob told me he was thirsty, he wasn't lying. he drank an entire pitcher of water almost single-handedly.

two games went too quickly. it definitely wasn't the bowling extravaganza that i had envisioned earlier, with all of my college friends and milkshakes amd being out until midnight. it was just jacob and i, and we were in and out in forty-five minutes.

but to sound sentimental and lovey-dovey and what have you, it was perfect just the way it was.

and on the way home was listened to classical music like bosses.

it's been a good prep birthday day. tomorrow should be fantastic. i'm going to wear this really weird dress that i bought, and today, my mom made me a lion king cake.

i repeat.

MY MOTHER MADE ME A FUGGIN' LION KING CAKE AND I GET TO EAT IT AND LOVE IT AND IT WILL BE THE GREATEST TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY CAKE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, OKAY.


um. here are some bowling pictures.

i guess we're adorable?

this is jacob.
he's my boyfriend.

matching shoes!

attempting to bowl.
attempting.

yep.
we tied.

day one. the trip to wal-mart.

it's the first day of june. we all know what this means.

1. i make a list. (a list on my blog?! NO.)
2. IT'S MY BLOG EVERYDAY IN JUNE GO! CHALLENGE! YEEEAH BUDDY.
3. it's two days until i turn that magical age where i can consume adult beverages.
4. my lovely boyfriend is here for the weekend to celebrate.

you obviously knew all of these things going in. obviously.

so there's my mandatory list for this post. i have no idea when those became mandatory. i just realized one day that hey, i really liked to write lists, and it felt easier to describe things in lists rather than writing long, boring paragraphs and scaring you all away. i hope that my lists aren't scary.

so. this post. it's about wal-mart.

during my english reading writing and research class this past semester, we discussed feminist theory. we didn't go into detail about how to approach literature with it, but we talked a lot about feminism. and of course, dr. aspinall, with his pink pants and intense shakespeare knowledge, was a hipster feminist. meaning that he was a feminist before it was cool. somehow, after reading this very interesting poem about dead poets wandering around a brightly lit grocery store that i pictured as meijer, we talked about consumerism.

i'd never liked walmart. after we discussed consumerism and feminism and all kinds of fun stuff for an hour and a half, i decided that i would never go to wal-mart to buy anything. ever again.


i also promised myself i'd never drink alcohol, but i have a bottle of wine waiting for me in the fridge for sunday, so that worked out well.

this really starts out with me moving out of my dorm room. as a resident assistant, i had a double all to myself, and as a resident assistant that joined a sorority, my room was full of STUFF. i spent five days moving out, and the last day i spent a good five hours just hauling stuff to my car and shoving the rest in a storage closet, because i get free storage for living in indiana and going to school in michigan.

i could not continue packing my room before i addressed the issue of my extra bookshelf, which was holding up half of my bunk bed. it was filled with signs of one of my addictions: empty dr. pepper cans.

in the fair state of michigan, one can return cans and get ten cents back. this is not true on indiana. how is this fair?

in michigan, you pay that ten cents when you buy the can. not in indiana. here in my fair state, we just have a big recycling bin and we throw everything recyclable (that word looks weird) in it and the city sorts it for us. alas, no money. we recycle out of the goodness of our own hearts.

i needed to go to walmart to return all evidence of my addiction so i could continue packing. i also needed trash bags to put all of my stuff in for the ride home. (that turned out to be a big mistake. which helped break my ipod. rest in peace, brick.)

i had never returned cans before, and neither had riley, jacob's fraternity brother and fellow RA who's on my staff next year. he's from phoenix where they have the same system as indiana. so we got in my car and drove to walmart together with my incriminating cans in the back.

(please note that i have just completed an hour of zumba, my hair is pulled back as far as my short hair will allow it to be pulled back, and i am in exercise shorts, a jog bra, and a baggy t-shirt.)

the ride to walmart is uneventful. the indie station finally comes in just in time to play the offspring, which is not my favorite in the world. i was really hoping for some mumford, or of monsters and men. no such luck.

we pull into the parking lot and riley helps me carry my three bags of cans inside, which is nothing for him, because he's at least six five. and we run into betsie in her truck. she's going to be on our RA staff next year too. so we wave excitedly at her and run over.

her entire truck bed is full of cans and bottles.

me: that's a lot of cans.
riley: BEER CANS
me: we are not on campus. no RA mode.
betsie: it's from my parents, jeeeeez.
me: how much money do you think is in these cans?
betsie: enough for taco bell.

thinking like a true college student. i, for one, hate taco bell, but that's another post in and of itself.

so, we make our ungainly way inside of walmart, going through the wrong door, so we end up walking across the store with this incredible amount of cans filling up an entire shopping cart. we make it to the can dispenser place, and there are six dispensers. betsie kindly shows us how to put the cans in butt first and then when you're done feeding it, you press a green button and it gives you a receipt for how much money you earned.

total earnings: $2.90. not as much as i thought.

betsie, riley and i start on betsie's pile. i have a zumba song in my head and i'm shaking my hips. riley is heaving bottles out of betsie's full shopping cart and then suddenly, every single dispenser is beeping.

we filled up all the  bins with betsie's cans.


me: RILEY! GUARD THE CANS FROM EVIL!
betsie: TO THE CASHIER!
riley: is this now a space mission?
me: WE'RE OUT TO DESTROY THE RING!

yes, this was still during my lord of the rings phase. which hasn't quite ended.

we find a nice lady working the self-check-out lane and she gives me my three dollars and gets somebody to clear the bins for betsie. meanwhile, she cashes betsie's receipts, and she's already at twenty bucks. and we still have a lot more.

we get back to riley. we fill two more of the bins. betsie walks away with a lotta cash.

remember when i said that i would never buy anything from wal-mart again? um. yes.

i needed tash bags. we were already here. i had three dollars. so i asked the greeter, a nice old lady, where they were.

betsie: oh don't worry, i know where they are.
nice old lady greeter: aww, let me do my job!

did betsie know where the trash bags were? of course not.

of course, we found them after riley pined away for a really big TV, and then he bought one of this big tupperware bins, because he has store stuff too, being from arizona and everything. we decide, as we are literally dancing down the aisles, that we shouldn't be caught around people, so we go to the self-check-out lane. i buy my trash bags in spanish.

check-out: por favor, tome su artículo fuera de la zona de embolsado.

OVER. AND OVER. AND OVER. i've never used cash before at a self-check-out machine, and it's yelling at me in spanish. i just don't know where my cash goes. so what do i do?

what any sane person does. i start screaming back at it. in spanish.

people start staring at me. i am not hispanic. what i am is a sweaty white girl in work out clothes yelling at  an automated machine. in spanish.

riley: emily i think you should just pick up-
me: SILENCIO!

pretty much.

on the way out, the nice wal-mart greeter lady asked us if we knew where the bags were. when betsie said no, she chased us out of the store.

the story ends with how i bought my trash bags for ninety-seven cents and how we literally did zumba across the parking lot. i kid you not, betsie and i were doing zumba across the parking lot. and we stepped out in front of a truck and almost died. that was pretty awesome.

we followed betsie back to campus. we weren't sure what she was listening to but it involved a lot of hand flinging and hair tossing.

i got my mumford and sons. roll away your stone, if you're wondering.

on a completely unrelated note, i have found my tune for the summer, and it will probably frequently come up in the rest of this month's blog posts. prepare yourselves. and please, listen to it, it is my far the greatest thing i have heard all year.

yes. it is called "i just can't wait for booty."

let the blog every day in june go! challenge begin! and may the odds be ever in your favor. (that's another post.)

pass the tofu.

i'm in a predicament that has nothing to do with this blog post. but i'm going to share it with you anyway, because i never actually start with what i'm actually going to be blogging about.

i've decided, since i've been rather busy this year and haven't blogged on a regular basis, that i'll do another blog every day in the month of (insert month here) go! challenge.

my predicament is this: which month?

i am sorely tempted to do june. because june is my favorite month for a number of reasons, including my twenty-first birthday. let's get excited.

however, i did june last year, and july is busier than june, and i like the challenge of doing it in july.

if you have a preference, let me know. if you just simply can't live without my blog and you can't read it in june, i'll do july just for you. but i really hope that you can live without my blog, because it's not that fantastic.

but anyway.

this blog post is REALLY about my spring term. and my adventures through food. so buckle your seatbelts, kids, we're going to talk about food, korean kickball, and more food. and probably some more food.

spring term: english 381, asian-american literature and culture.


students: fifteen. fourteen females. one male.


class time: nine thirty until twelve thirty. try to stay awake and make it to lunch.


professor: dr. chen, small and stern english professor from taiwan. PhD in victorian era literature.

now that we have those stats out of the way. spring term.

dr. chen, being from taiwan, was very interested in teaching asian-american literature and culture. but how could we experience culture from japan, china, korea, and india in the middle of rural michigan?

through food, of course. on the first day of class, in her rather thick chinese accent, dr. chen told us, "i like to make people happy. normally that means i feed them." i wasn't going to complain with that.

but here comes my blog list, for all of my posts have one. this is the list of emily's fears about eating asian food.

1. i'm a vegetarian.
2. i'm a picky vegetarian. i think this makes my family hate me.
3. eating at restaurants that i don't know makes me nervous for the above two reasons.
4. i hate spicy food.
5. i just don't like to try new things in the culinary world.

fried tofu. om nom.

so one night, i sat in my dorm and dramatically told myself that i would get over this fear and i would change everything except numbers two and four. i'm going to be a vegetarian for the rest of my life, and my poor mouth will always be the most sensitive part of my body. luckily, i had elena with me, and as the class vegetarians, we stuck together.

first stop: hello sushi in saginaw.

i, of course, have never had sushi. i'm allergic to fish, so i wasn't that keen to try it. elena talked about getting vegetarian sushi, and that sounded super dandy to me, so we ordered some, along with some fried vegetable tempura, miso soup, and fried tofu. the rest of our table got a huge family style meal, and elena and i sat in the corner and ate our tofu. if you're wondering, miso soup is like, awkward warm soup with powdered tofu and seaweed. it's pretty slammin'.

the fried tofu was interesting. it was slightly mushy. that didn't really appeal to me, but i was hungry, so i ate all of it. the vegetarian sushi was rice with avocado in the middle, which is SUPER YUMMY. but there was on problem: it was wrapped in seaweed. seaweed and i didn't get along. so elena got to eat the whole thing.

and then we ran into our first problem as a class, not just me as a vegetarian exploring the world of asian food: chopsticks.

this is me.
eating fried tofu. with chopsticks.

this didn't bother ava, my sorority sister, who's vietnamese. she grew up on chopsticks. we watched as she devoured all of her sushi like she was born with chopsticks in her hands.

every time i put my chopsticks down i had to relearn how to use them, and i was instantly reminded of the ill-fated dr. reid vs. the chopsticks moment in season one of criminal minds.

reid asks for a fork. our waitress didn't speak english. so we plugged away with our chopsticks.

after we ate at hello sushi, we went to a japanese tea ceremony. a traditional japanese tea ceremony. it was very intriguing, all of the respect and other earthly feelings that are put into it. i can't really describe it, but at the end, we got to sample the "sweet", or the nice tasting food before you drink the tea, and then of course, the tea itself. the sweet was a small cookie, and i kid you not, a soy gel square that tasted like dates. i tried to get that out of my mouth by eating the cookie, but it tasted exactly the same. i then looked down at my tea, hoping that it would be good, and it was seafoam green. it was one of the most bitter things i had ever consumed in liquid form, but it was better than the soy gel square. when we were done with our tea and we had slurped on the third sip to show that we enjoyed it, we made origami swans. i felt pretty cool.

our next trip was to lansing, where we met with a korean minister who's daughter goes to my college. the church that he owns?

you bet your bottom dollar it's presbyterian, just like my college. not that we actually do anything presbyterian-like. our chapel is nondenominational.

dr. chen plays korean kickball.

so while we were at his church, we played korean kickball, which involves two quarters tied at the bottom of a plastic grocery bag. believe me, that hurt when i kicked it.

we then went to a small korean restaurant where, once again, the servers didn't speak english. dr. chen had done her homework: she wanted authentic food.

elena and i paired up and looked for options, hoping that reverend chon was going to order for us. which he did, in korean. this was slightly disconcerting, because we didn't know what he was saying. i ordered jab chae without the beef, and i was really hoping that he got the "without the beef" part. i felt more dextrous with my chopsticks while eating vegetarian dumplings (like the chinese dumplings that we made as a class at the service learning house together) and sticky rice. i tried some spicy stuff and ate half a bowl of rice to get rid of the spice.

then my jab chae came.

oh yeah.
those noodles are transparent.

see how it kind of looks like vomit?

IT TASTES LIKE AWESOME.

so. those noodles. are brown. and transparent. remember those sticky hands back in the nineties that you'd slap onto a wall and they'd stick?

that's what they felt like.

they tasted like regular pan fried noodles. they had the consistency of gummy worms.

the whole class wanted to eat my jab chae. so i had a lot of fun passing it around and watching people play with the noodles. not that i didn't play with them. i totally took one and saw how far it could stretch.

before leaving the charming capital of michigan, we went to bubble island at MSU, which was totally awesome. i'm not a big tea person, but i was assured that bubble tea was super yummy, so i decided to try it.

directions for ordering your bubble tea: pick your tea. pick your flavor. pick your bubbles.

milk tea sounded creepy and gross. so i got green fusion tea with half the sugar. i flavored it with green apple flavoring, because green apple rocks. and i got colored bubbles because they looked yummy, and it either that or mango jellies, and i don't like mango.

bubble tea!

bubbles. you're probably wondering what those are. they're flavored jelly pieces that stick right in the bottom of your tea. the straw is wide enough that you can suck them right up and swallow them whole like dr. house swallows vicodin, or you can chew them. they're quite chewy and delicious. the colored bubbles were pink and my bubble tea was bright green, so i felt like i had a watermelon drink that tasted like green apple and awesome sauce.

our third and final food adventure was to an indian restaurant in mt. pleasant after class. i was most nervous about this trip because indian food has an annoying habit of being particularly spicy. once again, elena and i were bffs.

we didn't need to worry about vegetarian options. the buffet had more vegetarian options than meat options. we loaded up our plates, and erica assured me that the vegetarian rice wasn't spicy.

erica underestimated the sensitivity of my mouth. the first four bites were great. then i was in a considerable amount of pain. but it was DELICIOUS, so i ate it anyway.

indian food. nom.

i got some fried vegetable stuff (that's the brown stuff in the top left corner of the picture), and on the first bite, it tasted like, i kid you not, french toast. then as soon as the french toast taste was gone, boom. spicy.

that green stuff in the corner? yeah, i didn't even try that. because somebody said it was spicy. which means, for me, it was really spicy.

i can honestly say that i didn't enjoy the indian food all that much. i didn't like the restaurant; it had eighteen TVs so i couldn't hear anything, it was dark, and the food was just too spicy. i wanted to get more jab chae from a korean restaurant.

we did many other things in my asian-american literature and culture class than just eat food. you guessed it, we read literature. we wrote papers. we did projects.

but we ate a lot of good food.

i was hoping that our last six page paper could be about our fun experiences with food, but of course, it was a research paper that i turned in yesterday with six secondary sources. a 381 level literature class can't be too fun, can it?

so, emily, our intrepid blogger, ate asian food. enjoyed asian food. remained a pure vegetarian. used chopsticks.

i also played korean kickball, chinese sword danced, made origami, and made vegetarian taiwanese dumplings. i also learned how to say "hello how are you?" in hindi. that was pretty neat.

i guess what i'm trying to say is this: college is cool. and i really like food.

for your general entertainment: dr. reid vs. the chopsticks.

THE PICTURE MOVES.

"let's pretend this never happened." really.

i haven't blogged in a month. is that a crime?

yes, i'm thinking it's a crime. so this will be a long rambling post about my last month and how that's been going. because i still blog about my life.

maybe one day i'll devote my blog to cats, and you'll come through here wanting to read about how i epically ran a red light, and you'll be completely thrown off guard.

but that's absurd, mostly because i hate cats. they're evil and i'm allergic to them. but i decided last week that if i were to get a cat, it would have the disposition of a serial killer and be named stephen king.

so here's what's been happening in the past month of my life.

THEY SUNK THE TITANIC. (i'm not sure who the "they" refers to.)

so, remember last post where i told you how to properly write a ten page paper? well, i turned that paper in on thursday morning, the same day that my brother drove my car three hours back to indiana, where i live. sometimes i forget that i actually live in indiana. but i was very painfully aware that i go to college in michigan and live in indiana when my car drove away and wasn't going to come back until he left for peru in may. this was april 19th. and i had plans to see titanic in 3D.

i hate 3D. i have a rare eye condition (syndrome? disease? ailment?) and can't see 3D, so really, i'm paying extra money to wear plastic glasses OVER my glasses so that the screen isn't blurry. and i hate the idea of bringing back movies in 3D. what happened to original movies like inception?

anyway.

i absolutely had to see titanic, because i went through a big titanic phase in seventh grade, and then one that lasted my last three years of high school, and i practically had the major cast and crew memorized (and crying woman at stern) and i would be damned if i didn't get to see titanic in 3D. so jacob, the dutiful boyfriend and i, well, we walked three miles to the theatre.

alma's theatre is a straight shoot down wright avenue. so there was no winding. there was also no sidewalk. it was about fifty degrees at the time of our leaving (six) to catch the movie (seven). i tweeted about leaving as we walked.

as we left the neighborhood for the businesses and the stretch of grass for the next two miles, amy, mal, and maggie pulled up. amy had gotten my tweet, and would we like a ride? i told them no for two reasons.

1. the rational reason- if we took a ride, we'd get there in about five seconds, which means we'd be waiting for half an hour for the movie.
2. i wanted to claim that i walked to the theatre and back. irrational.

so we walked.

we got to the theatre ten minutes early. we bought a popcorn and a shared water. waited in the lobby. heard celine deon (i have no idea how i spelled that) belting out NEEEEEEAR FAAAAAAR from the credits, which reminded me a tumblr post about jafar (holla if you've seen it!) and then when those were done rolling, we went in.

it was just us in the middle and an old guy in the back. so we configured the seats into a couch, laid back, and watched titanic.

when my parents saw titanc in theatres in 1997, when i was six and a half, there was an intermission. i knew where it was going to be, because we had titanic on VHS, and it was so long that it was in two tapes. i was just waiting for the captain to look super grave and say, "i think you may get your headlines, mr. issmay" and then there would be an intermission, because that's where the tapes switched. instead, it went straight on to cal looking angry and then bitch slapping rose for being drawn like one of jack's french girls. and then the ship really started to sink and on the big screen, that was pretty powerful.

except i had to pee. like, really badly.

i'm not one to pee in movie theatres in the middle of the movie. i feel like i'm being rude. plus, the titanic was SINKING, and it was almost one hundred years to the day since the actual incident, and i was speechless with emotion like i am every time i watch the lion king. when the ship was finally gone and all those people were screaming in the ocean, i was completely blown away thinking, this happened to real people. real people like me. i'm never going on a cruise.

when the movie was over (i couldn't finish the credits because i was getting a rare bladder disease) we left the theatre and found that it was forty-five degrees and raining. RAINING. i had an umbrella, but it's a big bulky umbrella, and i carried it all the way there, so i wanted jacob to carry it back. he refused, so i just put up my hood.

jacob's logic was we could cut through that scary grass field to the abandoned wal-mart parking lot that was lit, which was good, because i'm afraid of being assaulted in the dark and the dark in general. so we started out across a field of knee high grass that abruptly ended at a decently deep ditch with a creek. it was eleven thirty at night and my jeans were already soaked up to my knees.

of course we jumped the creek/ditch and i fell in the mud.

the rest of the walk passed amiably enough. we talked about the titanic and how for a long time, bruce issmay was the most hated man in the world and how he died of grief, kind of like dimmesdale in the scarlet letter, except bruce issmay was real and actually owned the titanic. we didn't see the dead cat we passed on the way there. we sang the head and the heart and by the time we hiked three miles back to campus, it looked like we'd gone swimming. in our clothes.

i wish i had a picture of us in my dorm room, ringing out our pants. my shoes didn't dry for a week.

I MADE FRIENDS AND HUNG OUT WITH GOD

i've never made it known on my blog that i'm religious. maybe you guessed that i am. maybe you thought i worshipped the devil. well, i don't. i'm church of the brethren. you can look it up, but the wikipedia article makes it sound like we're amish. we're not, trust me. i couldn't blog and be amish. or watch criminal minds. and cook easy mac.

during the break week between winter term and spring term, i stayed on campus, alone in my room, for something called ACCL, (we call that excel) and that's alma college chapel leadership. i go to chapel on a regular basis, i wanted to be more involved, and the shirts looked cool.

the first part of this story is how everybody left except me, i didn't have any food so i ordered a pizza, and then i had a panic attack about being alone in my building, locked my dorm door and my bathroom door, and cried on the phone to my mother. and how the next morning, when making my oatmeal, i found dried vomit all over the lobby. so i had to put on my RA pants and call security to come clean it up, because it's somewhere in my contract that i don't have to touch stuff like that.

then they shut off my heat and my room stayed at about fifty-nine degrees, so i dressed like my grandmother.

there were seventeen of us at ACCL, with three fantastic student leaders. ACCL was intimidating. later, i would describe it as "RA training, except your residents are christians that want to hang out with you." i realized, very quickly, that it was about leading a bible study. my first bible study was on sunday night, and on monday, i was leading one. i jumped in head first.

i'm not overly religious. my family thinks that religion is more of a personal thing. we go to church, and we have a collection of bibles in the basement, but they mostly sit. i've never read the bible or studied it. and here i was, surrounded by wonderful devoted christians who could quote me practically anything from any chapter. (i'm talking to you, phil.)

i don't really want to talk about religion in my blog. not because it's taboo, but i almost feel like it's that whole separation of church and state, and my blog is the state. which is presumptuous, i know.

but during ACCL week, with my sixteen new close friends, we did amazing things. we read scriptures and discussed them. we played soccer. we ate popsicles and helped out at habitat for humanity. we cooked and ate food together. we went to a park and completely lost our college selves and became kindergarteners. we cooked hotdogs. (i cooked a veggie burger on a stick. over a fire pit.) we loved each other and we loved jesus.

i haven't done ACCL justice. i'd have to make my own blog post for this. this post is already too long and i'm giving you mad props for reading. maybe i'll make an ACCL post and put it in our facebook group.

but i swear, we had something special at ACCL, and i think it was truly the work of god.


SPRING TERM HAPPENED

before i even start, spring term is something that alma does in may. it's a three and a half week class. it's intensive. there are cool ones that go to new zealand (that's you, connor!) and to peru (that's you, aaron!) and ireland (that's you, choir!) and other places. next year i'm going to london.

this year i stayed on campus to study asian american literature and culture with dr. chen, the tiny taiwanese professor that will kill me slowly in critical theory next fall. she's very nice, but she's not kidding when she takes grammar nazi as a compliment. i have a long way to go in my grammar nazi-ism.

the first thing we did was read poems about japanese interment camps. i'd heard of them, but really, they don't teach all of the terrible things that americans do in US history. i mean, i don't like history, and i haven't taken a history class since US history, but i feel like i should've known about internment. it was an awful thing.

besides just reading and writing about literature, we "traveled". we went to the detroit institute of art (which was awesome) and then we went to lansing for dinner, where ava and i found some MSU gamma phi betas. we knocked on the window, pointed vigorously at ourselves and at them, and made crescent signs with our hands. thank god they got it and agreed, not quite as excitedly.

last week we went to saginaw and ate japanese food. elena and i are vegetarians, so we ordered separately while everyone else had family style. miso soup, which is powdered tofu and seaweed, is good. the fried vegetables were yummy. the fried tofu was mushy. the vegetarian sushi, which was rice and avocado wrapped in seaweed, was terrible. i just can't eat seaweed, i guess.

but i ate the entire meal with chopsticks. i took instragram pictures of the entire meal.

oh, i forgot to mention that i kind of sort of not learned how to chinese sword dance. it involves a lot of tai chi and wobbly swords, and i think i was holding it wrong the whole time.

we went to a japanese tea ceremony, and i drank the weirdest green tea (that was totally green) that i've ever had in my life.

i learned the real chinese story of mulan, and where she trains for fifteen years, starves herself in the wilderness, gets oaths and addresses cut into her back, and then she leads an army for twelve years, cuts off a lot of heads, gets married, has a kid, still cuts of people's heads with the baby in her armor, the entire time dressed as a man. most. badass. woman. ever.

on thursday we're going to lansing to meet with a korean minister. i hope i like korean food.

I GOT THIS AWESOME BOOK IN THE MAIL.

this is ungodly long. if you're STILL reading, you are devoted to this blog, probably more so than i am, and i give you mad props.

the first day of spring term, all four of my books were in at the bookstore, so i went to go get them with jacob, and i opened them at breakfast. the one i needed for class that day was camp notes, the japanese internment poems that i hated, but instead, out came this bright red book with a taxidermied mouse on it that said "let's pretend this never happened."

i knew i'd seen the title before and vaguely remembered wanting to read it. it was probably tweeted by roger ebert and i read his review on it. but while i stared at this book in the middle of the cafeteria, all i could think was, "somebody sent me the wrong fuggin' book."

but then camp notes came later that day, and i found the receipt for the mouse book, and it had a nice note from my friend jonathan, who always wants me to blog more.

jonathan, this entire post is dedicated to you. and right now i can't remember if i spelled your name correctly or not, and i'm too lazy to get on facebook to check.

"let's pretend this never happened" is a book by jenny lawson, an avid blogger, but she gets paid to do it. the first thing i thought was, "damn, she blogs like me. except way better."

so. if this blog post is stylistically different, it's because she's rubbing off on me. her book is styled like her blogs. and i've been reading an awful lot of it lately because it's too hilarious to put down. so go read it.

to top this all off, i got an email yesterday from the student life office that asked me if i would like to be their permanent weekly blogger. would i be interested?

THIS IS MY DREAM, FOLKS.

in a nutshell, i'm getting paid to blog by the school, and it's considered an internship. so it can go on my resume. and then i can justify quitting my job later in life and blogging like jenny lawson.

but she's a professional blogger. which is something that's so far out of reach for me that i just kind of sit on my bed and night and think about it.

I FORGOT TO MENTION MY LORD OF THE RINGS BINGE

during ACCL week, and all of the week after, and the week after, but mostly during ACCL week, i discovered that dave had lord of the rings extended editions.

i've never read lord of the rings, but i love the movies in kind of but not the same way that i love harry potter.

i watched sam and frodo destroy the ring so many times and i tweeted about it so much that two things happened.

1. i added the word "lordoftherings" to my phone so i could hashtag it on twitter.
2. i was in the top ten #lordoftherings tweeters when i clicked on the hashtag.
3. i lost a lot of followers.
4. mordor followed me on twitter.

finally, a dark lord that followed me back.

that wasn't two things. that was four. good thing i'm an english major.

AND THEN I ENDED MY BLOG POST.

i didn't know if i could write this. my internet has been awfully strange, and this finally popped up on internet explorer (i tagged the tweet about this as #firstworldproblems) after i refreshed the page about eight times, and now i can finally blog. about the past month. and not really do it justice.

i think i gave titanic justice. and then i just kept going on with my life.

congratulations, you have read the longest blog post of my career, i'm pretty sure. now go read "let's pretend this never happened" or eat a popsicle. you deserve both of those things.